Critical Masses Technology, Inc.

This is part 5 of a series on drag and drop with Xpages and Dojo.

This is part 4 of a series on drag and drop with Xpages and Dojo.

Reading all the press and Yellowverse comments about release 8.5.1 of Notes/Domino is illuminating. As a developer, yes, 8.5.1 is the answer to a great many prayers. In particular, XPages support is being fleshed out nicely, with an upgrade to the native Dojo JavaScript libraries and enhanced documentation. A definitive XSP tag dictionary would be nice, though. I still eagerly await a proper XPages debugger, which, I am happy to report, seems to be in the works. A complete rewrite of the creaky LotusScript editor based upon the modern goodness that is Eclipse is a welcome addition.

This is part 3 of a series on drag and drop with XPages and Dojo. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here.

This is part 2 of a series on drag and drop with Xpages and Dojo. Part 1 is here.

Welcome to the first in a series on how to implement drag and drop behavior in your XPages applications using the Dojo drag and drop toolkit. I’d be in remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to recommend that XPages beginners refer to Declan Lynch’s excellent and easy to follow Learning XPages tutorial series to bring you up to speed. Declan’s tutorial was also an inspiration, of sorts, for me to embark on this series.

I’m getting ready to start blogging about some Dojo hotness in XPages. IBM saw fit to include the Dojo 1.1.1 toolkit in the Domino 8.5 distribution, but unless your native XPage widget is calling the resources you’re out of luck if you want to access the toolkit's resources yourself. In general terms, how do you access a resource that’s on your server’s file system? You see, if you try to put a resource’s relative URI into an XPage’s resource list, Domino will prepend the path of the current database (er, application) -breaking the URI.

Four years ago, I wrote this essay lamenting the lack of modern visual tools that can at least somewhat mimic the Notes design paradigm. Not much has changed. In fact, things have gotten considerably worse in the arena of visual forms-like tools to create workflow apps.

In my previous installment I discussed the simple framework for a client validation framework that works in the Notes client and the on the web using a common codebase in Javascript. The implication, of course, being that the validation is client-side and only has to be written once. The framework is skeletal and does not represent a functionally complete example, although it can be made to be.