Yellow Is The New Black | SnTT: Vulture at Work: Using Autolaunch capabilities

Thursday 18th, May 2006

SnTT: Vulture at Work: Using Autolaunch capabilities12:17:14 AM

Written By : R. J. LeschCategory : Show 'n Tell Thursday

Rocky Oliver's blog recently covered a useful method for overcoming a known Domino bug with the Autolaunch feature. This was great timing for me and my teammates, because it turned out to be the last piece we needed to produce a Notes application that could replace a Sharepoint site.

We were asked to build an application to replace a Sharepoint app which features a "Shared Documents" page. Clicking on any of these items in the Shared Documents page automatically launches the item in its native application (Word, Acrobat Reader, whatever).

In Notes, of course, we'd simply attach the file to a document in a standard Doc Library database. However, there the end user had to click twice -- once to open the Notes document and once to launch the attachment. We could simply set up the application to launch first attachment, but we had several issues with that approach:

1. When using the native "Autolaunch first attachment" form property to launch Word documents, the Word document opens but loses focus; the user sees the Notes window, and the Word document is in the background. Rocky's tip gives background on this.

2. Even if that weren't an issue, the document might not necessarily be an attachment. It might reside on a shared network drive, or in another Notes application. In those cases, we didn't want to have a second copy as an attachment; we wanted to reference the master document on the network drive. We could put an .ndl file or something in the document, but most of our end users don't know how to create .ndl files, and

3. we wanted to make this easy for the end user to maintain. Nothing more irritating than to have to submit a work request every time you want to share a document with your colleagues.

4. We wanted to include other types of links in the same view. If the resource someone needs to share is not a Word document, or a PDF, but rather is a public webpage, or a SQL Server table or something, we wanted to be able to include those in the view as well.

The result was an "Autolaunch Entry" form, and its two accompanying views, the public view and the "maintenance" view. Ryan Case, of Case Innovations, of Clive, Iowa, is the designer primarily responsible for this. If the Autolaunch Entry view is opened in the maintenance view, Notes opens a Notes document, which can be edited to deliver one of five things:

an attached document
a file on a network drive (provided the user has access, of course)
a webpage
a Notes application
any other result which can be programmed in LotusScript

Anyone in the company can set up an entry to do the first four, simply by attaching a file, speciying a server/path, or entering the desired URL. The fifth option requires knowledge of LotusScript, of course.

If the above view entry is opened from the public view, Ryan's view calls a script from queryopendocument which interprets which of the five options the document author has chosen and acts accordingly: launch the attachment, open the website, run the custom LotusScript, or whatever.

Ryan's original implementation, which he built for us a year ago, didn't include the launch-attachments feature, but when I saw Rocky's tip I knew we could adapt it to do so. We rewrote our scripts to be extensions of Rocky Oliver's LS.utilities.BE.6 and LS.utilities.FE.6 script libraries, which are included in the sample database he provides in the aforementioned tip.

So, thanks to Rocky, Ryan and "Show N' Tell Thursdays"!

Show-n-Tell Thursday

Comments :

1. Stephan H. Wissel05/21/2006 01:58:23 PM
Homepage: http://www.wissel.net/

When you are looking for a "autolaunch" on the web. I've coded a round trip editing capability for Domino attachments using webdav. See http://dominodav.sourceforge.net/ Code is in the CVS only. I could need a hand...
stw