Running Notes

Category Development DXLMagic
A couple of weeks ago I blogged Use The Tools, about using tools to help you. Yes, you could do it the hard way, but why? Last time I wrote about Noteman. Today I want to mention Stephan Wissel's DXL Magic. I wrote about it way back in May 2009. I happened to need it again yesterday and luckily I checked OpenNTF to see if there was an updated version. Guess what? There is! And it's super easy to use! Lots of options, easy to use interface.

In my particular instance, I wanted to search through a database to find where particular views were being used. I had reason to believe there were several unused views in the application, but I wanted to be sure I didn't have some code somewhere that called them. Enter DXLMagic. I simply used the Export button to export the design of the entire application into an XML file. Using XMLPad, I easily searched for the names and aliases of the views. Stephan has added lots of other really cool features in here and it's FREE! So don't do more work than you have to! Use the tools!

Here is a screen shot of the Windows version...

Posted by Kathy Brown At 9:42 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Lotusphere
I've had a really hard time pulling my thoughts together about Lotusphere. I still have so many thoughts leaping through my head and haven't completely processed any of them.

First, I love the way Lotusphere always motivates me to be better than I am. I always learn something new, and more importantly learn how many other cool things I need to learn. It's that shot in the arm to learn more, do more, blog more, tweet more (is that possible?).

Anyway, on Sunday, I had my first ever gig speaking at Lotusphere. Tom Duff and I presented “The Top Things All New IBM Lotus Domino Developers Need to Know”. I had a really great time and would highly recommend speaking to anyone. It was a fantastic experience that was nerve-racking and exhilarating. Hopefully the presentation is attached here...

On Tuesday I attended the Nerd Girls panel and the Nerd Girls BOF on Thursday (at 7AM!). As expected, this was a great experience. The big takeaway for me was the need for at least one mentor, as well as community. A mentor is important for obvious reasons. Less obvious is the fact that at least one of your mentors should be DIFFERENT than you. Someone who can provide a different outlook and opinion. For women, that can mean having a male mentor. The other important item is community. Having a group that understands you, that you can vent to, feel a common bond with. A group to which you can ask “Has anyone felt this way?” and others in the group will say “Yes!”. To that end, we've created a Nerd Girls group on Linked In, please feel free to join if you're interested. *

*Also note that none of this advice is limited to women. It could just as easily apply to any group or facet of your life. We just happen to be focusing on women. If you have a problem with that, start your own group.

Of course, I also attended some really great technical sessions. :) I tried to focus a bit more this year. In years past, I would just try to hit everything and I knew that wasn't going to work this year. Like many, I attended sessions on XPages and feel ready to jump in. I attended some Quickr and Symphony sessions, as well. As always, some really great content. I've downloaded all the slides and will spend the next several weeks trying to digest everything I saw.

I had a really great week and can't wait til next year!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 7:00 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (0)

Category Lotusphere Running
So sadly, @RunningNotes was a miserable failure. I still like the idea, so am hoping we can try again at some future conference. It really is fun and motivating to run with other people, and to know that they'll be out there waiting for you!

Even though we didn't meet up as a group, I still managed to run every day. Without the streak, I never would have run every day. I might not have run at all, it would have been too easy to keep telling myself “I'll run tomorrow”. On the one hand, without the streak I wouldn't have been motivated to run. On the other hand, I was definitely cursing the streak a few of those days, and could have used more sleep.

Oh well, it's Lotusphere, who needs sleep, right?

Posted by Kathy Brown At 10:20 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (6)

Category Lotusphere
This was my third Lotusphere, I attended in 2008 and 2009. Both years, I mostly hid out on my own, attended sessions and not much else. The first year, I didn't even go to the Welcome Reception, for fear of not having anyone to talk to. (Please feel free to approach me with your hand in the shape of an L placed on your forehead the next time you see me.)

What a difference a year makes. Since Lotusphere 2009, I really started blogging and tweeting. I got involved in the community, which meant I “knew” lots of people coming into this year's Lotusphere.

“The Surreal Year” started off tweeting from the airport in Manchester, NH and having Mary Beth Raven tweet back that she was on the same flight. I saved her a seat and flew down with her. We shared a cab, along with Rob McDonagh, whom I had met for the first time at IamLUG last August.

I arrived on Saturday and headed off to BALD, the Bloggers Annual Lotusphere Dinner where (surreal alert) I met my co-presenter for the FIRST TIME. Yes, that's right folks, Tom and I had never met in person until the day before we were going to present.

I had a great time meeting people in person that I had met long ago online, mostly on Twitter.

Further surreal moments -

When I presented a session AT LOTUSPHERE, twice!
When Mary Beth Raven mentioned me in the Nerd Girls panel.
When Ed Brill asked my opinion during Lotusphere Idol.
When Rob Novak called out my tweeting during his Code Giveaway session.
When I met some “stars” of Lotusphere and they knew who I was.
When some Yellebrities (yellow + celebrities = yellebrities) took off their shirts to show me their tattoos.
When I sang at Kimonos (never done karaoke before) with my back to the crowd and turned around to see half of Lotusphere had walked in to the place.

And the number one surreal moment of Lotusphere 2010:

When closing session speaker Brian Cox was sitting in Kimonos on Thursday night. I approached him for a picture, and he said I sang well!!! AND, he posed with Papa Smurf. AND he said I could take the pic if I would “twitpic it”!!!

More to follow on Lotusphere, there is just so much to write about that I had to mentally break it into chunks.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 10:31 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (11)

Category Lotusphere
Others have already blogged about the Nerd Girl panel this year at Lotusphere, so I won’t rehash the details, except to say that I went last year and it was different than I expected. I had feared it would be a man-bashing session, and it wasn’t at all. It was instead very informative, and interesting to hear about the panel and how they got where they are.

So what hasn’t been blogged about much (and isn’t at the moment on the lsonline.info site) is the Nerd Girl BOF. I missed the BOF last year, but will try my best to make it this year!

BOF: What Does It Mean To Be A Nerd Girl
Thursday, 7AM, Swan, Macaw 2

As a Nerd Girl, have you ever wondered how you get into a more technical field? Or how to move upward in your career? Or how you start writing or speaking at conferences? This BOF will give you a chance to speak with other women in the Lotus community who have experience with many of these challenging topics. Whether you want to share or you want to learn, join us as we help each other and make connections for coaching and mentoring.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 12:41 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (2)

Category Running
Just a reminder, if you'd like to run/walk/crawl/hop/skip/jump (don't want to leave anyone out!) with others at Lotusphere, then don't forget to pack your gear and follow @runningnotes on Twitter.

I'm planning to run at 7AM each morning, and we can meet at the Atlantic Dance Hall. Feel free to send a DM to @runningnotes if you'd like to join me, or if you'd like to organize a different time or location. DMs to @runningnotes will go to all followers.

See you in just a few days!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 9:59 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (1)

Category Domino Development Noteman Tools
I have to remind myself to use tools now and again. Frequently in Domino development, I will slog through and do things the way I know how to do them, whether or not it is the best or most efficient way, simply because it is the comfortable way.

That’s just plain dumb. I admit it.

I maintain an application, like many others it has documents and responses to those documents. Occasionally users need to “re-assign” the responses to a different parent document (and of course, it needs to be done ASAP!). Fine, there is a mechanism within the application to do so. However, life being the way it is, sometimes for reasons too lengthy and boring to get into in this post, the documents needing to be re-assigned don’t get re-assigned.

So, what to do? I could write some code that gets the UNID of the correct parent and replaces the value in the $REF field in the response documents, but I don’t want to do that. And better still, I don’t NEED to do that. There is a TOOL that already does that for me.

Enter Noteman. I received a copy of this to review sometime ago and honestly just didn’t get around to playing with it. The icon is a little Swiss Army Knife looking thing, and I think that is completely appropriate, as it is one of those tools that does a million things. I am lazy and never fully explore it, so am not even aware of all the possibilities. Heck I don’t even know what half of those things are for. BUT, if you take the time and figure out what is there, it can save you a ton of time. Just think how long it would take you to open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew…

Anyway, back to Noteman, which has an “Editor” tool. Right there in the Editor screen is the button “Make Response…”, which does EXACTLY what I needed the other day. I didn’t have to code anything, test it, fix it, re-test it and then update the documents. I opened the parent document in Noteman, SELECTED and COPIED the UNID (can you hear me weeping tears of joy?), then opened the response docs, hit “Make Response…”, put in the new UNID, saved and closed. There is a Multi-Editor tool as well for changing a bunch of docs at once.

It is a cliche, but don’t reinvent the wheel. Use the tools available to you. Save yourself the time and effort that could be spent writing better code!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 10:00 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Running Lotusphere
Thinking about running at Lotusphere? I will be! If you'd like to join me and several others, we'll be heading out each morning at 7AM. We can meet in front of the Atlantic Dance Hall in the Boardwalk area. The loop around the "lake" is a little under a mile.

This is completely informal. Please run at your own pace (or walk!) and run as much or as little as you would like. A few of us got together at IAMLUG to run each morning, and it was very enjoyable. Please don't be shy, feel free to join us. You don't have to be fast or "good", just willing and able! I'll probably run at a "conversational" pace and hopefully get in three laps, but we'll see how much sleep I get!

Hope to see you there!

MTA: Follow @runningnotes on Twitter for updates. Perhaps we can use that Twitter ID to communicate, in case anyone wants to meet up with other runners at other times/locations!

Posted by Kathy Brown At 11:01 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (4)

Category Mutliple Values Lotus Notes
Okay, so in my last (technical) blog post, I noted a problem I had with getting multiple values in a view via LotusScript. I learned and posted that the NotesViewNavigator was the solution.

The wise Nathan Freeman posted a comment, which I think has quite a handy littly tidbit in it, but I fear not enough people read my blog, let alone read the comments on my blog days after a posting, so I am blogging about his comment. With an example and screenshot.

Here is what Nathan said:

"Make a set of documents with several multi-value fields, all text.

Field 1: Red, Green, Blue
Field 2: Me, Myself, I
Field 3: This, That, The Other
Field 4: Apples, Churches, Very Small Rocks

Give them all the same values for Field 1, but randomize the values for fields 2-4

Now create a view that has a column for each of these fields, in order. Set them all to "Show multiple values as separate entries."

On the first column, turn on categorization.

Now look at your view CLOSELY.

If you want to do something really special, try CreateViewNavigatorFromCategory("Red"). Then walk the entries and retrieve the .columnValues.

Discuss."

So, I tried it out. Really special indeed.

Say you had an application with a salesperson form. In this example we have a whopping three documents, but stick with me. We have three fields, "date", "item" and "quantity". These three fields are multi-value fields. We’ll assume we have three documents because we only have three salespeople, one for each.

Doc 1:
11/15/09; 11/30/09; 12/15/09; 12/31/09
Apples; Oranges; Grapes; Peaches
10; 30; 40; 20

Doc 2:
11/15/09; 11/30/09; 12/15/09; 12/31/09
Oranges; Apples; Grapes; Peaches
40; 30; 20; 10

Doc 3:
11/15/09; 11/30/09; 12/15/09; 12/31/09
Peaches; Grapes; Apples; Oranges
30; 40; 20; 10

Now if we put these three docs in a view, without "Show multiple values as separate entries", I would have three rows in my view, with all the data lumped together, separated by semi-colons.

Or I could follow Nathan’s tip and get this:

And then I could use CreateViewNavFromCategory(dateVariable) to get all my column values. Sort of the "GetAllEntriesByKey" version of the NotesViewNavigator, but better. Way better.

*Newbie tip – don’t sort the remaining columns. Notes will screw up the whole "show as multiple values" thing and each sorted column adds rows for each value for each field. Not good.

*Second newbie tip – don’t rely on the view preview in Designer for this type of view. It almost never looks the same in Designer as it does in the client. There is a reason for the "Preview in Notes" button, use it.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 7:42 AM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (3)

Category Personal
I wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year!

I was randomly talking with someone a couple of weeks ago about the "holiday" (interpret as you will) most celebrated around the world. I said New Year's, since it is not based on any one religion. My google search was inconclusive.

Anyway, whether you see it as a special day, or just one more on the calendar, I hope 2010 brings you all that you want and more.

And for those of you who have seen "The Princess and the Frog", I hope 2010 brings you all that you NEED and more.

Posted by Kathy Brown At 6:58 PM Location Portsmouth, NH | Permalink | Comments (1)