Chris Blatnick’s recent article about the usage of column colours for the creation of gantt charts in Lotus Notes encouraged me to post my recent experience with this medium as well.

The requirements in my case had been a bit different and so is the solution. Instead of a progress chart I had to create a chart similar to a calendar or the ToDo list in iNotes. The Lotus Notes integrated calendar style view wasn’t appropriate for that solution.

The solution I used had been using seems to be not so widely known and involves the possibility to use shared images as view icons additional to the IBM provided view icons, which are addressed by numbers.

The only challenge with the calendar view itself had been the way Lotus Notes is displaying documents. While everything was working fine for documents not extending over the end of the week everything clashed since the view displayed the Monday of the following week in the current week as well as it included the Thursday till Sunday of the current week in the next weeks schedule.

This however could be easily solved as well in creating a response document to the master calendar entry to be displayed for each individual week.

Thanks Chris for sharing all your really useful tips and experiences in regards to the Lotus Notes interface design.

I fully agree that Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) is not the technology of choice any more these days. But I had to provide a data input functionality today where my brain declined to come up with a more recent solution.

Imagine a 3rd party Lotus Notes application where some data has to be entered. The data is currently stored within a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Unfortunately the design of the 3rd party application is far to complex to use the Lotus Notes client provided import functionality, especially not because the whole system is trying to be kind of relational which would make an automated import far to risky. And we are speaking about an on-off import, nothing that will happen on a regular basis. On top of this I was unable to use Lotusscript functionality.

(more…)

This is the follow up to my last entry with regards to name fields in Lotus Notes/Domino applications. While Part I had been focused on the Administration side I am now continuing with the Development aspects.

When developing a Lotus application the first question would be whether name fields will be required at all and if so what kinds of fields are required. If it is decided that no name fields are required I would still suggest following my other comment regarding the prevention of the use of the $Readers field.

(more…)

Today I learned about an interesting Lotus Notes design feature, which is definitely eligible to be shared (of course) and placed to the Development Best Practices list.

The current application I am coding does make use of three frames within a frame set to have it appearing more professional then the standard R5 View Navigator. Until today I did never bother about any naming conventions of these frames. One had to be the header, the left one the navigation and the right one the mainframe.

But: if you don’t want your application falling back to the ugly view navigator on the left hand side when somebody is opening a view link or tries to open a view from the View -> Goto Menu it is important to have at least one frame named “NotesView”. This frame is obviously internally used to define the main frame of the application and with it the target of each undefined view or document link.

The information I found at IBM related to this issue is related to version R5 of Lotus Notes. I am not 100 percent sure whether this still applies for version 7 but I successfully tested it in version 6.5 today.

(more…)

This weekend I made some strange experience with a ‘foreign’ database design. The database consisted of a basic frame set with a navigation page on the left and the main view display to the right. The navigation had been driven by an outline that mainly linked to view design elements.

After adding a new private view to this database I dashed into some really buggy behaviour. When I closed the database while on of the private views had been focused, the next time I opened the database I ended up with an error message:

Insufficient frame/frameset handles

and a whole bunch of database links opened up on the top of my workspace.

A quick research on the web has not provided me with any clue until I started to inspect the whole design. To make it short:  the issue had mainly been caused by (missing) target frame settings. (more…)