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Java != Java on Domino  

By Oliver Busse | 1/9/25 2:26 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Today I again encountered some strange things on different Domino machines. It’s Java again. The other specs are: my local dev box is 12.0.2FP2, running in a container using the HCL image the other machines are natively installed 12.0.2FP2, also Linux there are no language packs installed at all The parts that are used: some Java in an NSF, defined as managed bean (but this doesn’t matter) Java is using ExtLibUtil and java.util.Calendar some XSP in an NSF

Announcing Open Mic with the HCL Developers - A New Monthly Series  

By OpenNTF | 1/8/25 12:25 PM | Business - Events / People | Added by Oliver Busse

OpenNTF and HCL announce a new initiative aimed at improving the collaboration between our community and HCL and at giving feedback on their products. Each month, we will host an “Open Mic” session with experts, developers, and PMs from HCL, and everyone will be invited to ask questions on a specific topic for that month. This is an occasion to get in touch directly with the people who build the product and provide answers to your most challenging questions.

SSL Certifier is not trusted  

By Fredrik Norling | 1/8/25 12:30 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Root cert not trusted when getting SSL encrypted data using XPages or Domino agents I have seen a problem with getting data using XPages or agents from Amazon hosted services because they now are using a Amazon Trusted Root. But it can be others poping up also in the future.

Creating an IBM HTTP Server key db from a .pfx file   

By Martijn de Jong | 1/7/25 2:41 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

It’s a question that I get quite often. “Can you create a IHS key database for me from this pfx certificate”? Multiple of our customers use IBM HTTP Server. Either for HCL Connections, but also as a reverse proxy for other services. Most of those customers use a wildcard certificate for their IHS server that has to be renewed each year. As I hate this kind of repetitive work, I created a script to do it for me. As it could be of use to others, I decided to create a blog article about it.

DBMT tool enhancements in Domino 14.5 EA2   

By Daniel Nashed | 1/7/25 2:39 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Sometimes small changes open many new possibilities. The following DBMT tool command line options are added to DBMT in Domino 14.5 EA2: -systemDbs (-sd for short) Allows compact to process system dbs, which are usually ignored), as well as databases listed in the dbmt_compact_filter.ind file. -regex (-re for short) Now a database name can be specified using regular expressions. If an .ind file is specified, the database names listed in the .ind file can be regular expressions. -validateDbs (-vd for short) Does not execute the updall or compacts, but outputs the list of databases that could be affected by the DBMT command (mainly to validate -regex inputs). Can be used in combination with -sd

Notes Timedate explained  

By Daniel Nashed | 1/7/25 2:38 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

There have been a couple of partner blog posts speculating about the background of the recent Domino 13.12.2024 problem, which might be a bit misleading. For the background of what happened in detail and how HCL addressed the problem please wait for the official technote update. But what I can tell is that HCL fixed it on a lower level function addressing all functionality in Domino and business partner applications using the effected functionality. This means the only safe way is to apply the Interim fix provided by HCL for all supported releases including the extended support versions! What I also can state is that all Notes TIMEDATE functionality is working as intended and are designed to handle date times from 1.1.1 to the end of all times.

Domino Router bug - seems to also affect server availability index  

By Darren Duke | 1/7/25 2:36 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I was waiting for the other shoe to drop for this bug. Surely the errant code wasn't only in the router task. Well, it seems that it's NOT only the router. After working with a customer on fail-over issues in a cluster we came across this interesting availability index "issue". On a server patched for the router bug (or that is un-patched server that has not been rebooted) the "show ai" command behaves as expected, the XF, Hits and AI min and max are populated However, on a rebooted, un-patched server AI is completely and utterly blank

A little Domino container story  

By Martijn de Jong | 1/3/25 7:05 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

If you’re active in the Domino world, it’s unlikely that you missed that we had a little problem 2½ weeks ago.... This blog post is not about this problem itself, but this problem caused many servers with outdated Domino versions to urgently need an update, and this is a little story about one of those servers.

New project Domino Download Server  

By Daniel Nashed | 12/30/24 7:11 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Over the x-mas I had a bit of time to work on an idea I had already a while ago. Some customers can't directly connect to the internet. Not even with a proxy. Domino AutoUpdate and also the Domino Download script both support proxy environments including authenticated proxies. The Domino Download script leverages the curl command-line which is very flexible. But also Domino AutoUpdate has full proxy support. Still some environments can' download anything from the internet. Some are even air gapped. The idea was to come up with a NGINX based service which could be the source for all your Notes/Domino downloads. I wanted it to work in different environments.

Useful Notes SmartIcons: Reformat text is my favorite  

By Daniel Nashed | 12/30/24 7:09 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Notes formula are one of the lost arts. I am a big fan and have started to work with Notes at a time where we had no Lotus Script nor Java. Today formula language is still very powerful. I am using it in many ways including C-API and Lotus script. There are many @Commands for UI automation available. But there are also Lotus Script UI classes. The really cool part of formula language is that you can use the commands in SmartIcons. The following command selects the body text and sets the text to Default Sans Serif with 10pt. --- @Command([EditGotoField];"Body"); @Command([EditSelectAll]); @Command([TextSetFontFace];@GetMachineInfo ([EnvVariable];"NAMEDSTYLE1_FACE")); @Command([TextSetFontSize]; "10"); @Command([EditDeselectAll]); --- But there are more SmartIcons I use every day... .

New Release: XPages Jakarta EE 3.3.0  

By Jesse Gallagher | 12/23/24 1:57 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

As part of finishing my holiday gift shopping, I published version 3.3.0 of the XPages Jakarta EE project today. This release contains a number of bug fixes to do with asynchronous and scheduled tasks based on some edge-case and intermittent trouble I ran into while developing some apps with it. Additionally, it has some consistency fixes for the Jakarta NoSQL support - in particular, it improves mapping of object properties to columns, matching the item names case-insensitively and matching special fields like FIELD_CDATE to matching columns with formulas like @Created.

Improving the usability of the view column icon – Kwintessential Notes  

By Patrick Kwinten | 12/17/24 2:54 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

IIcons are a great way to let certain document information standout in a view with minimal space. I assume you know you can add icons to a Notes view , right? Although the icons are out of date , limited and don’t support accessibility much, there is a way to add show them in a view with some added value. How? I will show you…

PSA: XPages CSS Changes in 14.0 FP3  

By Jesse Gallagher | 12/17/24 2:52 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Fix Pack 3 for Domino 14.0 came out last week and, in addition to the usual spate of fixes you'd expect from an FP, it brought a potentially-significant and -breaking change to the way XPages handles style attributes for components. This is presumably in the interest of supporting the pathological strictures of Content-Security-Policy, but it applies whether or not you have taken any other steps to implement CSP. The specific change is that the XPages renderers will now take the style attribute, externalize it to a class, and then make a <style> block for it.

Thomas Hampel  

By Thomas Hampel | 12/13/24 5:35 PM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

*** ALERT *** Development team just identified a new issue which will affect ALL Domino server versions as of TODAY ( 13th of December 2024 ) Starting as of today, if you restart your Domino server, a router error will result in delivery failures due to a routing loop. Mail rules will also start failing. It is a date/time issue in our code. We will of course provide a fix as soon as possible for all Domino versions that are in support. Furthermore for older versions in extended support, customers with an extended support agreement will be provided with a fix as well.

ForAll Loops and Type Mismatches  

By Paul Withers | 12/13/24 9:05 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

There are always challenges when moving from something familiar to something similar but different. When you've been working with that "something familiar" for a very long time, some things become second nature. But when you move to "something similar but different", sooner or later you hit an error and become convinced it's not working like it used to.

Lotus Script - Check if a file or folder exists  

By Daniel Nashed | 12/13/24 9:01 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

There isn't a direct function in Lotus Script to check if files exist. Most of us have written a function like this multiple times as a helper. I am working on an application which will be available as open source soon and I needed one again... Here is a version of a check function, which should cover all cases and might be useful for you too. It doesn't handle hidden files -- I know. But I didn't want to add that logic.

Getting column colouring out of the view design   

By Patrick Kwinten | 12/12/24 12:13 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

In Notes you can define the row color in a view programmatically. In the example you still hard-code the colors (and conditions) in the column, and so the design of the view. So if you want to change the colors and conditions you need to change the design. In an environment with restricted access to Production or CICD processes in place this takes a long time and it includes the intervention of a developer. I am not sure when but somewhere in time the “User definable” option for the column value was introduced.....

Quick Tip: using an object as custom property  

By Oliver Busse | 12/12/24 7:14 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Just for my own record because I always forget: If you ever need to pass any object data to a custom control, use this as the property data type: com.ibm.jscript.std.ObjectObject or com.ibm.jscript.std.ArrayObject depending on if you just need one or more objects.

Another dev attempt comes to an end – row coloring  

By Patrick Kwinten | 12/6/24 7:30 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

For an application I want to be the row colourings in the Notes client manageable, from a (profile) document or something similar. I chose a profile document instead of a named document since the named document lacks methods to access via @formula and if you want to open a document from a outline entry you only have the @formula option…

Disable PDF Export in HCL Connections 8  

By Christoph Stoettner | 12/3/24 7:47 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

PDF Export sometimes uses a lot of resources and disabling helps to stabilize the environment I had some issues with PDF export functionality in HCL Connections the last weeks. The server became unresponsive multiple times due to high load from PDF exports. To quickly address the issue, the simplest solution is to disable the PDF export feature by configuring the icxt.pdfexport.access.requiredrole property in the Resource Environment Entries.

Changing the file size limit for a community  

By Martijn de Jong | 11/30/24 3:27 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

By default, a HCL Connections community can contain 500 MB of files in the Files widget. Depending on what kind of content is posted in the community, that might not be enough. It’s possible to change the file limit, both for communities and for personal files.

Show/Hide column in a NotesView  

By Patrick Kwinten | 11/30/24 3:25 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Most applications have different types of users. Some are normal users, some are power-users and some are administrators for the application. Mostly we provide different sets of views for these user categories and to optimize performance and indexing these users sometimes share the same views. But the information in that view is not always useful all types of users.

HCL Domino Leap – Fixing Embedded Forms Issues After Updating to 1.1.5   

By Milan Matejic | 11/26/24 5:02 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

If you are embedding HCL Domino Leap Applications or Forms into portals and sites not hosted on the same Domino Server as Domino Leap, you might encounter issues due to the Content-Security-Policy (CSP) HTTP Response Header. Starting with HCL Domino Leap 1.1.5, a Strict CSP policy has been introduced.

Reaping the Benefits of Standard  

By Paul Withers | 11/21/24 7:36 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

More than three years ago we began work on VoltScript. A little over a year ago we released our first Early Access code drop. There were certain core principles to which we developed. Two of these were a modern developer experience and adoption of standard development practices. Over recent weeks I received ample evidence of the benefits as improved and extended Archipelago, the build management engine of VoltScript.

Sort it out (your JSON collections)  

By Patrick Kwinten | 11/8/24 3:49 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The day after the US elections. Time to sort it out. Not the election results but the collections in the Run4Fun application. I hope you like lists with JSONObjects in your XPages application as much as I do but what you see is normally the order you stick the objects in the list. If you want them to have sorted in a certain way, perhaps by a certain key (firstname, lastname, email, age, time etc) either you have your source (a NotesView?) adapted to it OR you have to apply something that does that to your objects in the list. That something is called a comparator.

Modern email protocols: DANE, MTA-STS and TLS-RPT  

By Martijn de Jong | 11/8/24 3:47 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

n my recent OpenNTF webinar on modern E-mail Server operations, I covered several SMTP-related protocols like DKIM, SPF, and DMARC. However, with ongoing efforts to enhance the security of SMTP, new protocols have emerged, and these are the focus of this article. Two weeks after my OpenNTF presentation, my former colleague Erwin Stamer, contacted me regarding the DANE status of my domain as it was yellow instead of green. He was looking at the status of my domain as they were implementing it at his employer (a large Dutch bank) and was looking for an example. I must admit that I initially had no idea what DANE was, but as it was in line with my presentation, I dived into it. DANE, MTA-STS and TLS-RPT all work together, but let’s look at them separately.

Partial refresh gone bad   

By Patrick Kwinten | 11/4/24 3:43 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

For a (very) large and complicated intake form I have checkboxes that based upon the value (checked/unchecked) should calculate the visibility of multiple sections of the form. I guess most of us remember Tim Tripcony’s comment on a question about partial refresh on SO. That seemed to work fine from scratch but the intake form has grown and grown during the years due to regulations and the responses from the chained xsp.partialrefreshget calls gone bad. As a result sometimes the other sections pop up very late or not at all ��

Notes intermittently hangs or opens mail or other database slowly after 30 minutes of inactivity  

By Daniel Nashed | 10/28/24 2:20 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Notes intermittently hangs or opens mail or other database slowly after 30 minutes of inactivity This might help you in some network situations and it came up today in the OpenNTF Discord chat. TCP/IP keep alive is a functionality in the network stack to tell the server's TCP/IP stack and also the active components like firewalls, VPNs etc, that your session is still alive -- even the application is not sending any data. The Windows default keep interval is 2 hours. This Windows sends a keep alive for a TCP/IP session only. Linux and MacOS have a default keep alive interval of 75 seconds, which is a much more reasonable default. On Windows you can change the value by adding a new registry value, specifying a shorter keep alive interval in milliseconds. A good default value would be 75 seconds like on Linux and MacOS.

Key Rollover vs Certifier rollover  

By Daniel Nashed | 10/28/24 2:18 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

This is probably a topic many admins never really looked into and you might still run with your very old 630 key size. Key size and certificate key size play an important role in your security and you should be aware of it. Key Rollover Rolling over keys is a quite normal operation. It's a best practice to rotate keys at least when the recommended key strength changed. Rolling over a key is client side initiated but requires an admin action. Certifier Rollover When rolling over certifiers you are creating a new key for your certifier and sign it with the right signing ID. For your organization certifier this will be the organization certifier itself which signs itself. Once that operation completes you have to re-sign all OU certifiers, server IDs and Notes.IDs step by step in this order. You also have to take care of all cross certificates, Vault trust certificates. The process is quite complex and needs planning:

Upgrading OnTime in a container | Roberto Boccadoro  

By Roberto Boccadoro | 10/25/24 5:32 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Running Domino in a container is becoming more and more popular in these days. I assume the reader is familiar with the topic, I am not going to explain how to create and run a Domino container. If you want to know more about Domino containers watch the replay of the webinar that Martijn did for OpenNTF and read his presentation. OnTime is included in Domino, starting with Release 14, is a great tool and I encourage my readers to use it, the version included in Domino is free and very powerful. The issue is that Intravision, creates new releases of OnTime faster that HCL creates new releases of Domino, which is obviously understandable. For example the OnTime version included in Domino is 11.1, but the most recent is 11.5. Hence if you want to keep updated your environment, you need to upgrade OnTime. That is easy if you run Domino on Windows or Linux native, but what if you run Domino in a container ?