Launch the Domino Designer from Eclipse to debug your custom Designer extensions.

Cameron Gregor asked me in a comment whether it is possible to launch the Domino Designer from eclipse in the same way like the Notes client and the answer is yes this is possible. In this post i will describe what you have to change in your existing notes launch config to start the Designer from eclipse. This enables you to debug Extensions for the designer or XPages. To follow the steps you need a working Notes plugin target and a launch config for the notes client. If you need help with this you can learn how to do this in my tutorial "How to configure Eclipse 4.3 to develop plugins for Notes Part 1 and Part2".


The goal is to have a full working Domino Designer, launched in Debug mode from eclipse.

The first step is go to your eclipse and open the "Debug Configurations" dialog.

In there duplicate your existing notes launch config.

Then change the Name and the "run a product" field to Domino Designer and com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde.

Switch to the "Arguments" Tab and change the Program arguments to

-vm ${rcp.home}/../jvm/bin\j9vm\jvm.dll
-personality com.ibm.designer.domino.personality
-product com.ibm.designer.domino.product.dde
-debug
-console
-nl en_US

Save your changes with the "Apply" button. Then click the debug button to launch Designer. Be sure that you have no open instance of Notes/Designer because only one instance can be open at the same time.

When everything works, you will get a designer window with a welcome screen. To close the welcome screen, choose "Close Perspective" from the Window menu.

Then you should see your normal Designer UI. Maybe you get many error message in the Problem view that some Java elements cannot be resolved. No problem we will fix this in the next step. 

Open the Preferences of Designer and navigate to "Plug-in Development" -> Target Platform. Change the location from "NotesProgDir\framework\eclipse" to "NotesProgDir\framework\rcp\eclipse". Click Apply and "Ok". Eclipse will reload the target platform.

After reload all error message will be solved automatically in the background. Now you can try or debug your extensions in  Designer.

Ask the Experts Q&A session Managing Domino Upgrading and Migration transcript is available

IBM hosted and Ask the Experts Q&A session  about Domino Upgrading and Migration on June 3, 2014. The Audio replay and the transcript of the FAQ is now available on developer works. Very Interesting questions and answers. If you upgrade your Domino infrastructure in the near future i strongly recommend to listen to this session.

Configure the Notes 9 Masthead (ShortcutButtonBar) with a desktop policy

One of the new features of Notes 9 is the Masthead which is a shortcut bar to access often used functions in Notes. The user can configure which icons will be shown in the view menu of the Notes client. But what if you want to preconfigure this feature for your users on roll out? Although in the Desktop policy are no settings for the Masthead, you can configure this with managed settings.

The settings which icon are available is stored in the "com.ibm.rcp.ui.prefs" file in the "workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.core.runtime\.settings" folder in your data directory. To add an action add a line to this file with the id of the action set to true. To remove an action add the id with false.

Vorschau auf die Google I/O 2014

Andreas Proschofsky vom Standard hat eine umfangreiche Vorschau auf die Themen der diesjährigen Google I/O 2014 zusammengestellt. Diese enthält nicht nur Informationen für Android Freunde sondern hält auch viel interessantes für IOS Nutzer bereit. Google plant nämlich, seinen Anwendungsentwicklern mit Quantum Paper eine platformübergreifende App Entwicklung zu ermöglichen. Diese Apps sollen aber nicht einfach nur den selben Look auf allen Platformen haben, sondern sie sollen ähnlich wie es schon bei Smartphone und Tablet der Fall ist, sich dynamisch an die jeweilige Platform anpassen.

Andere Themen in seiner Vorschau sind:

• Android 4.5 vs. 5.
• ART vs. Dalvik
• Wearables
• 64-bit
• Zukunft der Nexus Serie
• und und.

Alles Neu bei Google: Die große I/O Vorschau

Ich bin schon gespannt, welche seiner Annahmen eintreffen. Es bleibt auf jeden Fall spanned.

xPages in Notes client fails with XPCOM error 0xcf1f30001 after upgrade to Notes 9.0.1

I have upgraded my Notes Client from 8.5.3 FP2 to 9.0.1 FP1 and after this upgrade no xPage based application works in the notes client. In the trace of the client i found an "CLPDN0031E: org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error 0xc1f30001"  error with the stack trace:

org.eclipse.swt.SWTError: XPCOM error 0xc1f30001 at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.error(Mozilla.java:2663) at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Mozilla.create(Mozilla.java:732) at org.eclipse.swt.browser.Browser.<init>(Browser.java:99)......

Actually no XULRunner (Mozilla rendering engine which is used by XPiNC) based functionality of the client is working. I have analyzed the problem and found that the rcpinstall.properties file in the workspace does not point to the XULRunner plugin which has been updated for Notes 9.0.1.

To solve this problem close every instance of your Notes client and open the rcpinstall.properties file in the "workspace\.config" path in your data directory with your favorite editor (notepad.exe will work) and change the line

Notes Browser Plugin Tips & Tricks

After his great FAQ about Notes Browser Plugin, Kevin McDonald has added another valuable info page to IBM Notes Domino Wiki. The Notes Browser Plugin Tips & Tricks contains helpful informations regarding the following topics:

• Infos about the migration from standard client to the browser plugin.
• Special Notes.ini settings for the browser plugin.
• Tips how to log problems in the plugin.
• Tips about the bookmark handling

Libreoffice 4.2.5 has been announced!

Today the document foundation announces Libreoffice 4.2.5. According to their release plan this version is ready for enterprise deployment. So if you have an older version of Libreoffice deployed, now is the right time to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of this fantastic free open office suite.

The most important new features in this version are:

• A complete overhaul of the calc formula engine which improves the performance significantly.
• Many new and much better import filters of various file formats.
• Improved enterprise integration featues to control deployments with Windows group policies.
• A new prettier icon set (Sifr). If you are upgrading from an older version you have to change the icon set in the preferences to get the new one.
• A new start screen.
• Many many bug fixes and performance improvements

 

You can find a complete list of new features in the release notes of Libreoffice 4.2.x.

The download can be found on https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-fresh/ 

Temporarily disabling and re-enabling Notes roaming user status

The roaming feature of the notes client works really well and i always recommend to use roaming on production systems, but there is one caveat, if you change the notes id of the client when roaming is enabled, you will get all sort of weird problems. So NEVER change the notes id while roaming is enabled on your client. Normally changing the id in the client is not necessary, but when i test readers field functionality i want a quick way to change the id without logout and relogin of my windows session. 

Fortunately with Notes 8.5.2 IBM introduced a Notes.ini setting with which one can disable roaming temporarily. So if you have the same usecase as i, add "DisableRoaming=1" to your notes.ini before you change the notes id to the id of another user. After you finish your testing, you can re enable roaming with "DisableRoaming=0" in the notes.ini.

You can find all details how this great feature works in the technote Disabling and re-enabling Notes roaming user status on the fly.