Collaboration Today

A new tool for creating rich text

By Andre Guirard | 1/26/23 7:32 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I’ve used an earlier version of this in other applications, but now it’s greatly improved and expanded. This is an API for creating rich text, including all the variations of sections, tables, image backgrounds, links, borders… This is an initial 0.1 release, so there will almost certainly be more changes coming, but I need y’all to drive this. Download it, try it out, respond here with questions and suggestions

Always get the latest Huddo version in HCL Connections

By Wannes Rams | 1/26/23 3:09 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

We have documented how to connect to our version, but that documentation is focused on a manual install of Component pack and connecting to our systems from the start. I want to show how to do it if Boards is already installed and running using the automation scripts. You can obviously follow this guide if you did a manual install and connected to the HCL resources, I am just mentioning some specifics about the HCL automation you can ignore.

Overdue PSA: Reverse-Proxy Headers in Domino 12.0.1FP1 and Newer

By Jesse Gallagher | 1/25/23 11:19 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

Just over a year ago now, I wrote a blog post describing the sudden removal of my beloved HTTPEnableConnectorHeaders notes.ini parameter in the 12.0.1 release. However, during the administration-focused OpenNTF Repair Café today, I was reminded that I never modified that post or made a followup to detail the changes since then. I plan to remedy that here!

Nomad Web server connection options

By Daniel Nashed | 1/25/23 7:30 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

Nomad Web is a modern HCL client offering in form of a Progressive Web Application (PWA) running in your web browser. In addition to Windows or Mac, it also works on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions! So there is finally a client offering for Linux clients again! The Nomad Web application is installed on a server providing the required files for download. Those files can be stored on a SafeLinx or Domino/Nomad Web server.

The state of Social Business continued – Meetup

By Femke Goedhart | 1/25/23 4:14 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

The last HCL Ambassadors meetup we did last December had a bit of an open end and therefor we would like to continue where we left off: With the state of social business and the position of HCL Connection in it. Join us and let us know!

Windows Sandbox - A feature you should know

By Daniel Nashed | 1/23/23 2:20 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The sandbox can be a very useful tool for many different situations. I am often using it for Domino server or client install tests. But there are many other use cases including training environments etc. It's a full throw away sandbox environment recreated every time you start it. The only limitation is that you can't reboot the Windows for example after a software update. But even installing the Windows re-distributable run-time package does not require a boot. Most applications like Notes/Domino install it on their own. I needed it to test my own applications. But there is an easy way to download and silent install it:

NGINX TCP Stream with SNI support. More than helpful for lab environments

By Daniel Nashed | 1/23/23 2:15 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

In production you usually want centralized certificate handling and off-loading TLS termination to a load-balancer. I posted scripts to have NGINX realod certs automatically from Domino CertMgr via HTTPS to leverage Domino's Let's Encrypt implementation. But sometimes you really want all your servers directly exposed over TLS. For example in a lab environment with limited resources and only one IP, you might want to still have each of the hosts expose their services on their own.

Quest for SAML to everybody continues

By Fredrik Norling | 1/23/23 2:10 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

My article regarding debugging SAML on HCL Domino is updated today with 2 points What is the SP certificate used for What can be wrong when you get a login loop Check it out in the article https://www.xpagedeveloper.com/2022/debugging-saml-setups-in-hcl-domino

Submit a session proposal for Engage - time is running out!

By Heiko Voigt | 1/20/23 4:53 PM | Business - Events / People | Added by Oliver Busse

I already did but for those of you out there still thinking about it - Theo asked for more proposals so don't wait too long - you can submit speaking propsosals until January 31st with this link.

Certificate Information tool

By Fredrik Norling | 1/17/23 2:40 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

SSL certificates, SAML certificates, Signing certificates the number is long of different kinds of certificates and you might need to check the name of a certificate, the start or end date or perhaps the thumbprint. I use the tool mainly to get end dates of certificates sent to me from customers because I hate when they expire and need to be changed without any preparation. And the worst kind that most administrators often miss is the certificates that is auto created i.e. in ADFS servers, Azure Enterprise apps, Okta

Download: Simple App Starter

By Andre Guirard | 1/16/23 5:58 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I was creating yet another HCL Notes demo client application recently and was hunting for an existing application I could copy the basic navigation features from without having too many unique things to get rid of. Strange hide formulas, Queryopen code, etc. It occurred to me there should be a template for that. So I created it and here it is (also available on the Downloads page).

Best practice error trapping in LotusScript

By Andre Guirard | 1/13/23 10:31 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The handling of unexpected errors is one of the headaches we have to deal with while coding. By their nature, you don’t have a specific strategy for handling that error, or it would be an expected error. But you don’t want to present the end user with the uninformative default error dialog. Default type mismatch error dialog.What line, please? Also, end user, please DON’T click the link. We’d hope the end user never sees the system error message, but if they do, we should at least have enough information for a developer to locate the code line that generated the error. That means we want a stack with line numbers, such as Java generates by default. In this article, I discuss three “levels” of error handling. You can choose how far to take it based on your needs and the amount of effort you want to put in.

HCL Connections Docs 2.0.2 High CPU load

By Urs Meli | 1/12/23 9:32 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

We noticed on at least 2 environments, that the CPU load was around 100%, Memory usage 100% and Swap used 100%. Prior to the update, the servers ran happily and did not show any issues. The process list (htop) showed a lot of /opt/libreoffice7.2/program/soffice.bin tasks.

Keycloak and Kerberos

By Urs Meli | 1/12/23 9:29 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Wannes Rams

Goal: Login to your Windows Client and do not have to login to Connections Motivation: Sure you can configure SPNEGO directly in WebSphere. But you might want to support OTP/WebAuthn for external users which are not in your AD?

Email Encryption

By Prominic.NET | 1/12/23 9:20 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Emails are now not only an important part of our daily lives but also one of the most used gateways for cybercriminals into our lives. Let’s explore how we can keep the door shut.

Users don't read your dialogs

By Andre Guirard | 1/12/23 3:02 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

You know how you open a dialog to ask for confirmation or additional information, or to warn them what’s about to happen? Yeah. People don’t read that stuff. The dialogbox is just an obstacle to completing their task. They may press Enter or do whatever it takes to get past it — especially if they routinely encounter other dialogs in the application. This article discusses best practices and tooling to get people’s attention where it’s needed and to avoid negative consequences of inattention.

Migration issue on opnact when using dbt.jar

By Wannes Rams | 1/10/23 9:59 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

While I was migrating a Connections 7 on premises customer to our cloud using the dbt.jar tool, I came across the issue that the OPNACT database did not want to migrate, it threw an error on the OA_NODE table stating that the source table has 38 columns and the target one 37 The column that did not exist on the target was OWNERMEMBERUUID Now the target database is a fresh cnx7 created database from the cnx7 scripts and the creation script does not contain this column. So I started looking through the database scripts to check what happened to that column over time.

How to perform a db2 redirected restore

By Wannes Rams | 1/10/23 9:58 AM | Infrastructure - Connections | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Sometimes you need to restore db2 databases on a different machine. For example during on prem to cloud migrations, or when moving database servers during an upgrade for Connections. In most cases some of the paths will be different. The LOGPATH is gonna be your main issue. Goal of this post is to show you how to restore the database and change the LOGPATH setting inside the database you are restoring on the fly.

Close & Reopen Database, and Ad Hoc Stored Form

By Andre Guirard | 1/9/23 9:09 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

I’ve been working on a Notes client application recently where I ran into the problem that I needed to create a design element and then immediately use it. This ran afoul of the Notes client’s design element cache — it wouldn’t recognize the new design element until I closed the application and reopened it. There’s no “close and reopen” command in any Notes scripting language, and if you close the current application completely, your code in that application stops running, so you can’t then execute a command to reopen it. Here’s my solution. Someone will probably comment about some much simpler solution I’ve missed, such as a secret command to reload the design element cache, but this way works.

Creating random names for test data

By Andre Guirard | 1/9/23 9:07 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Notes/Domino applications don’t just have code — they also store data, often a lot of it. But it can take years for them to accumulate enough documents for any performance issues to start seriously impacting users. When designing an application, especially a brand new one, it’s important to performance test it with an unreasonable amount of sample data so any performance issues become evident immediately.

Coding for translatability in Domino

By Andre Guirard | 1/5/23 3:13 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

This is partly for organization which, like HCL, use Domino Global Workbench to do translations of their Notes/Domino applications. But also, even if you do translations manually, or even if you don’t do them at all, it makes sense to learn good habits for creating applications in a way that makes translations simple, because it’s not that hard and you never know.

2022 in review and what's to come in 2023

By Heiko Voigt | 1/4/23 4:36 PM | Business - Events / People | Added by Oliver Busse

In resemblance to the song "sixteen tons", this altered first line of the chorus is not what my 2022 looked like at all. Sure enough it was a busy year - more busy than the most previous ones, and my daily struggle between family time, work and off-time projects got into a new dimension.

HCL Notes V12.0.2 and embedded views / UPDATED !!

By Rainer Brandl | 1/4/23 4:35 PM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

After migrating a Domino environment to 12.0.2 and upgrading the Notes Clients we could see the following issue. In an application where documents from another application should have been displayed in an embedded view the embedded view was not filled and kept empty.

Please wait until that HTTP service is ready

By Stephan Wissel | 1/3/23 10:17 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

Our brave new world of containers and microservices runs on a combination of YAML and shell scripts. Getting them to run in the desired sequence can be a challenge. When ready isn't ready All container environments have a 'depends' clause, so the container runtime can determine the correct startup startup sequence for the zoo of containers comprising the application to be launched. Each container will usually signal when it is ready. However ready can mean different things to different applications. In the container world it should be: the service is available. However it could be: service was successfully started, but might be busy with house keeping. In the later case the start scripts of the dependent services need to do their own waiting

Workstation-specific user application settings

By Andre Guirard | 1/3/23 6:23 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

For a couple of applications, I’ve needed a way to store values specific to the combination of a user and workstation. These are personal settings, in other words, but the same person may need different settings if they use the application on a different workstation. This would mostly be local filepaths, things like the last folder the user selected for a particular file-open prompt, or the path of an external tool the user has to launch in a given situation. A list of recently accessed files. These would be different on different workstations.

HCL Domino, view indexer stuck with very high CPU usage

By Jesper Kiær | 1/2/23 6:16 AM | Infrastructure - Notes / Domino | Added by Oliver Busse

I have a customer who has a Domino server running with very high CPU usage, and it should not, since it is not a very busy server. It is the indexer which gets stuck with very high CPU usage

Lazy code

By Andre Guirard | 1/2/23 4:12 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

You may be familiar with “lazy loading” on webpages. That’s where the browser doesn’t request images from the server until the page is scrolled to the point where they would be visible. The general principle is to not do work until you have to, both to speed up initial loading and because who knows, you might not have to do it at all. The same principle can be applied to writing code. For best performance of your code, try to avoid time-consuming operations altogether. In the LotusScript context, an example would be that you sometimes need to look things up in a view, but sometimes not. You don’t open the view and create a NotesView object until it’s first needed, and then once you have opened it, you don’t discard the object until you know you’re done with it. You can create your own cache.

Wonderful List datatype in LotusScript

By Andre Guirard | 12/29/22 2:55 AM | Development - Notes / Domino | Added by Roberto Boccadoro

The general term for it is “associative array” — a collection of values indexed by a string rather than a numeric index. You might be thinking you already know about the List datatype in LotusScript, but there are a few tricks you might not have thought of.

Announcing the OpenNTF Repair Café

By OpenNTF | 12/28/22 5:22 PM | Business - Events / People | Added by Oliver Busse

For years people have come to chat rooms hosted by OpenNTF to ask questions, share their knowledge and learn. OpenNTF is now extending that idea into a live, face-to-face meeting place every month to join and help each other: The OpenNTF Repair Café. It’s all about repairing things together.

Recent