Will the real Ed Brill please stand up? Friday morning at Lotusphere, there were all these guys standing around claiming to be Ed Brill.

First, there was this guy

Then there was this guy

And finally, this guy

The code for the QueryViews Tom Truitt and I demonstrated in the BP106 session at Lotusphere20008 is not in the downloadable slides or in the Analyzer application so I thought I’d write up something quickly here.

The first QueryView was simply a re-exposure of the Domino Access View (DAV) that was created from the data on Company forms. Normally, you’d just create a regular Notes view to show this data, but the idea was to do a Hello World like example for the first Query View. So, assuming you had a DAV out there for the Company form that you called Companies, you could construct a Query View with a SQL statement like this:

Schema := @DB2Schema(“”:”");
“SELECT COMPANYNAME, #NOTEID FROM ” + SCHEMA + “.COMPANIES”

This first query does nothing more than ask Domino to tell us what the db2 schema is for the current database which we then use to construct a SQL statement for the CompanyName and NoteID for records stored in the Domino Access View (DAV) we’d originally created. SCHEMA.COMPANIES tells DB2 we’re looking for a specific schema within the NSFDB2 database created for us by the setup of Domino for DB2 and within that schema, we want the Companies view which was created when we created the Companies DAV. All in all, it’s not a very useful Query View as it could easily be more useful as a normal view, but it establishes that our QV process is working.

Schema := @DB2Schema(“”:”");
State := @Prompt([OkCancelList]; “Select State”; “Select the state to return companies for”; “TX”; state_list);
“SELECT COMPANYNAME, #NOTEID FROM ” + SCHEMA + “.COMPANIES WHERE STATE = ‘” + State + “‘”

This second Query View is a little more interesting in that it introduces the idea of soliciting end user selection of data before any query takes place. In this case, we’re building a short list of states to select from. After the user selects one, we add it to the where clause of our SQL statement to bring back only records within the selected state.

state_list := “TX”:”OK”:”LA”:”AR”;
Schema := @DB2Schema(“”:”");
State := @Prompt([OkCancelList]; “Select State”; “Select the state to return companies for”; “TX”; state_list);
“SELECT COMPANY.COMPANYNAME, CONTACT.FIRSTNAME, CONTACT.LASTNAME, CONTACT.#NOTEID FROM ” +
SCHEMA + “.COMPANIES AS COMPANY, ” +
SCHEMA + “.CONTACTS AS CONTACT ” +
“WHERE COMPANY.COMPANYNAME = CONTACT.COMPANYNAME AND ” +
“COMPANY.STATE = ‘” + State + “‘”

In this Query View we introduce the idea of a join by joining two DAVs to combine the data for a Company and the Contacts associated with that company. Where in the earlier code, the #NOTEID would have resulted in opening a document for the associated company, in this Query View, the #NOTEID is associated with the Contacts table and therefore opens the associated Contact record.

state_list := “TX”:”OK”:”LA”:”AR”;
Schema := @DB2Schema(“”:”");
State := @Prompt([OkCancelList]; “Select State”; “Select the state to return companies for”; “TX”; state_list);
“SELECT COMPANY.COMPANYNAME, INVOICE.INVOICEDATE, INVOICE.AMOUNT, COMPANY.#NOTEID FROM ” +
SCHEMA + “.COMPANIES AS COMPANY, ” +
“DB2ADMIN.INVOICES AS INVOICE ” +
“WHERE COMPANY.COMPANYNAME = INVOICE.COMPANYNAME AND ” +
“COMPANY.STATE = ‘” + State + “‘”

In this Query View, we’re branching out a bit. While before we were selecting from a single DAV or from 2 DAVs joined together, here we are joining a DAV to an external DB2 database table that contains invoicing information for our customers. The join will result in only showing company records where we have matching invoices for the selected state. This example introduces the idea of federated data structures. Given that the demo environment was all running on one machine, federation was only to data external to the NSFDB2 database (but still in the same DB2 server and instance). In the real world, that data could also be external and living in a separate DB2 server, like one that might be running on an iSeries…a point we ran out of time to make in the session.
Again, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask

BP106: Converting applications to NSFDB2. What, how and why

Tom Truitt and I thank anyone who made it to our session and hope you got some good information and ideas from it. You’ll find the Analyzer here, and here are the session slides as Open Office odp, or as ppt. I’ll also make sure they make it into the hands of the official Lotusphere site and to the Genii sessions db as well. If you have any questions or feedback, please let us know.

Imagine a mirror server for the 30 percent (guess ?) of conference attendees downloading some piece of new technology from IBM over the next 5 days…like a 700MB Mac client download that’s the wrong file.

The download that was available early this morning for the Notes 8.5 beta mac client appears to be incorrect. After extracting the tarball, the directory structure is ibm/sol/domino and contains files that definitely look like a solaris server install. Running the install script provides this:

You C-coders have known about this for years I’m sure. Many of you Lotusscript types probably have known about this for years. Hell, once upon a time, I probably knew this. But yesterday, I ran across a line of code like this and was intrigued… “What the heck is that?”

If you peruse help for the String data type, you find:

The declaration of a string variable uses this syntax:

Dim varName As String [* num]

The optional num argument specifies that varName is a fixed-length string variable of num characters. A fixed-length string variable is initialized to a string of null characters (the character Chr(0)).

When you assign a string to a fixed-length string variable, LotusScript truncates a longer string to fit into the declared length. It pads a shorter string to the declared length with trailing spaces.

Fixed-length strings are often used in declaring data structures for use in file I/O or C access.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how many times I’ve written some kind of padding function so that my data was exactly the length I needed, whether for some kind of data export, or funky display table thing.

Oh well, old dogs can learn new tricks.

One of my favorite IBM/Lotus events is rolling through Dallas next week (Tuesday, Aug 28). It’s the Lotus Open Labs. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a day at IBM with 30 computers hooked up to external drives containing 30+ VM images of various labs, such as NSFDB2, Component Designer, Portal, Forms, you name it. A complete list is provided below.

The beauty of this event is that it’s a full day without a single speaker, just you and a computer with self-paced labs. There’ll be people there from IBM and WFS to assist in a limited fashion, but it’s a no pressure, no sales environment to learn how these technologies work. You should definitely check it out. Here are some registration links.

For whatever reason, on my production machine I’d been unwilling to run Notes 8 Betas with the Standard client. Call me cautious. (Ha! No one’s believing that.) I saved the Standard client for my VM environments. Now that 8′s gold, I decided to upgrade to the Standard client. I started the installer, and boing, unsupported upgrade.

Ok, I halfway expected that. Re-check the Release Notes (you do read the Release Notes don’t you?) and confirm that a client un-install is in order. Do a quick backup of the data directory, and uninstall. Check

Install the new Notes client, accept the defaults and start. Hmm, where are all my icons? Well, it looks like we have a REALLY fresh install. Where did it install to? After missing it a couple of time, I realize that the new default path for Notes 8 install is to c:program filesIBMLotusNotes, not c:program filesLotusNotes.

Time to do a little pruning of the old data directory and move it over. Take the bookmark.nsf, names.nsf, desktop6.ndk…leave cache.ndk, leave all the old NSD crash logs (only 20 or so) and dump files. Restart Notes client. Voila, up and running. A little sluggish at first as lots of indexes have to be rebuilt, but then pretty speedy. I’m loving the embedded ST client already. Nice.

Yesterday I posted about getting to know WebSphere Portal to really be able to state the case for a Notes 8 standard client deployment. One of the things I mused about in comments was a Portal entitlement from IBM for Domino customers so they could have that opportunity.

If IBM doesn’t have it, IBM should consider a Portal development entitlement for Domino customers that would allow them to effectively research this. I’ll ask Sue to look into it.

Reading through Ed’s blog from last week, I found that IBM has indeed made that entitlement available. Here’s the link, WebSphere Portal Server software – limited use entitlement. Essentially, for every Domino server that has Collaboration licensed users running against it (i.e. not just a messaging server), you are entitled to 20 users of Portal. Those users can:

• Deploy composite applications to a supported Web browser
• Use a Lotus Notes 8 client to access composite applications hosted by WebSphere Portal Server software

That’s exactly what I was thinking customers needed, a way to explore without having to make a fullscale committment up front to Portal. Well done IBM!

Answer: Evaluate WebSphere Portal

I know it sounds strange, but if you don’t truly know what Portal is and what it can do, then you really don’t know what Notes 8 is. Since you’re probably not going to rush out and deploy Notes 8 immediately, now’s the time to understand the Portal environment and it’s capabilities. To me, it’s similar to companies that deployed Notes as an email platform and never really looked at or discovered what they could do with it from a development perspective. Certainly there’s value in Notes as strictly a mail platform, certainly around the security and virus aspects alone. Right or wrong, a lot of companies found themselves evaluating the licensing down the road and wondering why they were paying so much for strictly mail.

I think a similar situation occurs with Notes 8. You can deploy the Notes 8 basic client, at which point, I think a decision is being made (consciously or otherwise), to relegate Notes to legacy status. However, blindly upgrading to the Notes 8 standard client isn’t necessarily the right answer either. For one thing, when you install Domino 8, it’s going to ask about your Portal server, as it wants to install templates on it. While I’m sure you’ll be able to retrofit that later, I’m not sure I want to mess with that down the road. So, if you’re going to take full advantage of the Notes 8 world, you’re going to have sidebar items in the client and you’re going to have composite applications that leverage the entire IT enterprise rather than silo’d Notes applications. And this is where you need to understand what Portal is, what the Lotus Component Designer is, and how these things play together.

So, what’s your next step for Notes 8? Understanding the entirety of the Notes 8 platform which means understanding Portal’s role in it.