IBM/Lotus

I decided to play around a little, and as an experiment put up one of my Notes projects on the open source repository GitHub. You can see the result here: http://github.com/TexasSwede/Class.MailMerge This is a script library in Lotusscript to create documents based on a source document and a template document. I have blogged about it before, but I added some functionality to it, and thought it would be easier for people to download a complete database.  

A few days ago, a question was asked on StackOverflow about how to export the content of a Notes view to Excel. The caveat was that some columns contained multiple values, but not on all documents. To solve this, I wrote a Lotusscript class that will export view data as either CSV or as an HTML table, both can then be saved to a file and opened in Excel. I am posting the code below. Enjoy!   %REM Agent View Export Created Mar 27, 2013 by Karl-Henry Martinsson Description: Code to export a specified view as CSV. Copyright (c) 2013 by Karl-Henry Martinsson This code is distributed under the terms of the Apache Licence Version 2. See http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.txt %END REM Option Public Option Declare Class RowData Public column List As String Public Sub New() End Sub Public Sub SetColumnHeader(view As NotesView) Dim viewcolumn As NotesViewColumn Dim cnt As Integer ForAll vc In view.Columns Set viewcolumn = vc column(CStr(cnt)) = viewcolumn.Title cnt = cnt + 1 End Forall End Sub Public Sub SetColumnValues(values As Variant) Dim cnt As Integer Dim tmp As String ForAll v In values If IsArray(v) Then ForAll c In v tmp = tmp + c + Chr$(13) End ForAll column(CStr(cnt)) = Left$(tmp,Len(tmp)-1) Else column(CStr(cnt)) = v End If cnt = cnt + 1 End ForAll End Sub End Class Class CSVData Private row List As RowData Private rowcnt As Long %REM Function New Description: Open the view and read view data into a list of RowData objects. %END REM Public Sub New(server As String, database As String, viewname As String) Dim db As NotesDatabase Dim view As NotesView Dim col As NotesViewEntryCollection Dim entry As NotesViewEntry Dim colcnt As Integer Set db = New NotesDatabase(server, database) If db Is Nothing Then MsgBox "Could not open " + database + " on " + server,16,"Error" Exit Sub End If Set view = db.GetView(viewname) If view Is Nothing Then MsgBox "Could not access view " + viewname + ".",16,"Error" Exit Sub End If Set col = view.AllEntries() rowcnt = 0 Set entry = col.GetFirstEntry() Set row("Header") = New RowData() Call row("Header").SetColumnHeader(view) Do Until entry Is Nothing rowcnt = rowcnt + 1 Set row(CStr(rowcnt)) = New RowData() Call row(CStr(rowcnt)).SetColumnValues(entry.ColumnValues) Set entry = col.GetNextEntry(entry) Loop End Sub %REM Function CSVArray Description: Returns a string array of CSV data by row %END REM Public Function CSVArray() As Variant Dim rowarray() As String Dim textrow As String Dim cnt As Long ReDim rowarray(rowcnt) As String ForAll r In row textrow = "" ForAll h In r.column textrow = textrow + |"| + Replace(h,Chr$(13),"\n") + |",| End ForAll rowarray(cnt) = Left$(textrow,Len(textrow)-1) cnt = cnt + 1 End ForAll CSVArray = rowarray End Function %REM Function HTMLArray Description: Returns a string array of HTML data by row %END REM Public Function HTMLArray() As Variant Dim rowarray() As String Dim textrow As String Dim cnt As Long ReDim rowarray(rowcnt) As String ForAll r In row textrow = "" ForAll h In r.column textrow = textrow +…

Welcome to the third part of this series of articles about how to write better code for the Notes/Domino platform. In part 1 I wrote about creating your forms in a way so you get an instant idea of how they work (what is hidden, computed-for-display fields, etc) and in part 2 the subject had moved to Lotusscript, more specifically variable names and comments. As already mentioned in that last article (as well as in some of the comments), breaking out code into functions is a great way to make code easier to read as well as dramatically easier to maintain. That is what I will focus on in this article.   Functions In Lotusscript, the functions are declared the same way as in Visual Basic: Function YourFunctionName(argument As DataType) As ReturnDataType YourFunctionName = ReturnValue End Function You can have any number of arguments, from none to many. However, it is often suggested to keep the number of arguments to a minimum. I try to not use more than three arguments, unless there is no way around it. If you need to send a lot of information into a function, use an array or a custom data type instead. Then it is easier to change the arguments later, without changing the signature of the function. I have occasionally seen that cause issues in nested script libraries. Also, with many arguments the function declaration will probably not fit on your screen, unless you wrap the line. I try to always keep code visible in the editor, as it is easy to miss things when you have to scroll sideways to view code. So let's take a look at one of the code samples in my last article, the one where we call names.nsf to get the email address for the current user. Let's make this a function (like Kenneth Axi suggests in his comment), but we will make it a more generic function, returning the email address for any user present in address book, not just current user. Here is the original code: key = session.CommonUsername Set view = db.GetView("People") Set doc = view.GetDocumentByKey(key) emailaddress = doc.GetItemValue("InternetAddress") Below is how I would write the function. We will talk more about error handling later, but you want to make sure to always check return values before you use them. The function takes one argument, the name of the user we want the email address for, and returns the email address, or blank if no user/address was found. The username must be in the same format as the names are being displayed in the view we doing the lookup in. Function getEmailAddress(username As String) As String Dim personname As NotesName Dim nabdb As NotesDatabase Dim nabview As NotesView Dim persondoc As NotesDocument If username = "" Then MsgBox "Username is empty. Exiting.",,"No Value" Exit Function End If '*** Create NotesName object and get CommonName part. '*** We do this so username argument can be in any format. Set personname = New NotesName(username) '*** Use Domino Directory on main server Set nabdb = New NotesDatabase("Domino1/MyDomain","names.nsf") If nabdb Is…

We already talked about how to make your forms and views easier to maintain. But in most Notes/Domino applications, a majority of the code is written in Lotusscript (at least for traditional applications, XPages are outside the scope of this discussion for now). It is not hard to write easy to read Lotusscript code. Just follow some simple rules. As always, there are more than one way to do things, but this is how I do it (most of the time). I found that this works for me.   Variables Always use Option Declare (or Option Explicit) in all your code. This will prevent you from getting errors later when (not if!) you spell a variable wrong. Option Declare forces you to declare all variables before you use them. It also helps you by warning if a function or method is called with a variable of the wrong data type. Most of your bugs can be avoided using Option Declare. Use it! Give your variables meaningful names. There is no need to abbreviate variables and/or give them cryptical names, or  you will just spell them wrong later. Use a naming system that makes sense to you. As I mentioned in my previous post, I avoid Hungarian notation, it just makes the variables hard to read. Since Lotusscript is a strongly typed language, the compiler is taking care of data types. I however do use some indicators for certain variables. For the few global variables I use, I do prefix them with g_, as I then can give local variables a similar name. By giving your variables meaningful names, the code also becomes largely self-documenting. Be consistent in how you capitalize your variables. I normally write all variables in lower case only, but that is my personal preference. That way they are easy to distinguish from built-in Lotusscript functions and properties of objects. Some programmers prefer some version of CamelCase, which is fine. I occasionally use that, especially in Javascript. Be consistent in how you name related variables. If you have a variable named startpos to indicate the beginning position of a string within another string, name the other variable endpos, not posend. Think through all variables you need so you give them good names. The variables posstart and posend are not as easy to read and understand as startpos and endpos. Of course, using CamelCase, posStart and posEnd are much easier to decypher. Use the same/similar naming convention for the Domino objects as IBM uses in the online help. Use ws, uidoc, session, db, doc, etc. If you need more than one object of any type, e.g. NotesDatabase, name them in a consistent way. I always use thisdb for the database the code is executing in, nabdb for names.nsf, archivedb for (you guessed it!) an archive database, etc. Declare the variables at the beginning of the code/subroutine/function. Don't declare them throughout the code, this makes it much harder to find them later, when you perhaps need to see what data type they are. Declare the variables in…

In a recent discussion thread in one of the forums on IBM developerWorks, the issue of which is faster, doc.GetItemValue() or viewentry.ColumnValues(). I decided to test this, using two Lotusscript agents, created to be as similar as possible, working against the same view of the same database. First, here is Agent #1, using ColumnValues() to get the value we are looking for from the first column of the view. This agent took 66.3 seconds to run, and below you can see exactly how that time was spent:   And this is Agent #2, identical to Agent #1, except two lines, first getting the NotesDocument from the view entry, and then using GetItemValue() to get the value out of the document. This agent took 225.8 seconds to run: In both agents, the call to get the next document in the ViewEntryCollection takes about 60 seconds. As you can see, the 30,000 calls to GetColumnValues() in agent #1 takes pretty much no time -- 1.3 seconds -- while it takes 133 seconds to open the 30,000 documents and read the value of the field from each one in agent #2. Almost exactly 100 times longer! In agent 2, you also have to add 26 seconds to get the NotesDocument object from the ViewEntry object. I hope this settles the discussion.