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Category Lotus Connections
Activities are my favorite component in Lotus Connections. Firstly they let get my team (which changes from task to task) and myself things done. Secondly it is available offline. In my part of the world* "always on" is not a reality. It is more "mostly on, but with horrible latency and low network predictability or realiability". So working online is quite often frustrating. I like the model "work offline but with a background sync" much better since it fits reality. Push mail works that way and more and more apps (push apps (?)) do the same. Of course sometimes looking at the sync bar is scary.


* here: all of AP. Quality differs widely.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 3:09 PM Location Singapore | Permalink | Comments (2) |      

Category Lotus Connections
Lotus Connections 2.x allows users to specify custom fields to be added to any item. This option is very useful together with the entry template function. Once a set of additional fields has been defined, they can be reused to capture structured information into an activity. Currently these additional fields are visible with the entry, but can't be visualized in other ways, most notably a table (It is on the list for future versions). So when a developer has an itch, it needs scratching. Connections comes with multiple entry points: the webUI, a Sametime plug-in, a Notes plug-in and a ATOM/REST API. A quick check of the ATOM XML showed, that the custom fields are in the XML and would be retrieved when loading the ATOM url. Fields are encoded as snx:field inside a feed/entry element. They come as type text, name, attachment and url. 70 lines of XSLT would transform that into a table for me. I created 2 examples: one for the list of attachments in an activity and one with a table of custom field values. The stylesheet needs to be called by something (I just downloaded the ATOM feed using wget and the command line version of DXLMagic to do that). Enjoy. As usual: YMMV.

Posted by Stephan H Wissel At 2:25 PM Location Singapore | Permalink | Comments (0) |