Mitch Cohen

Happy Second Blogiversary

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 11:48:00 +0000

Where does the time go? Seems like just yesterday when at the 2007 version of Collaboration University I started blogging,. Join me for a piece of blogiversary cake, and drop a comment if there is a topic you would like to see me blog about.

Lotus Connections @ Collaboration University

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:45:00 +0000

As previously announced Stuart McIntyre and I will be teaming up to deliver session on Lotus Connections at Collaboration University. No the presentation will not be 500 slides, probably won't even come close to the 400 slides that Show302 consumed at Lotusphere, but we will deliver some great content around best practices, configuration and customization of Lotus Connections. If there is a specific area of interest you would like to see covered by all means let us know we will do our best to work it in to the content.

If for some crazy reason you haven't registered for Collaboration University yet what are you waiting for? Don't miss out on the best technical content for Quickr, Sametime and Connections register today.

The dates for Collaboration University are

Chicago: September 14-16, 2009
London: September 21-23, 2009

Follow Collaboration University on Twitter for all the latest news.

See you in Chicago

Joins us at the Tri State Lotus User Group meeting on July 21 (XPages and Sametime 8.5)

Mitch Cohen — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:55:29 +0000

The Tri State Lotus User Group announced the next meeting for July 21, 2009. Registration and networking at 5:30 PM and two outstanding presentation from 6:00 PM to 8 PM. Declan Lynch will be presenting on XPages, Declan literally wrote the book on XPages so who better to present. Akiba Saeedi of IBM will provide an update on Sametime 8.5. If you want a glimpse of the new features in Sametime 8.5 which will ship later this year this is the session for you.

Check out the Tri State Lotus User Group site for all the details and to register, and follow TriStateLug on Twitter for all the latest news.

Folder View Preferences lost in Quickr 8.2 (and how to find them)

Mitch Cohen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:33:12 +0000

In Quickr 8.1 once a user set their preference for a view it was saved for them via a Cookie so every time they returned to that view it was sorted and showing the desired number of entries as the user last viewed it.

In Quickr 8.2 the "Folder Setting Cookie Feature" is turned off by default

For performance reasons, the folder settings cookie feature is turned OFF by default as of Lotus Quickr 8.2.

You can turn this feature back on by adding the following to qpconfig.xml

and restarting the HTTP on your server.

I wonder if anyone could provide any more detail on the performance impact of enabling this, though I will be testing since I know my users like this feature in 8.1

Technote 1389893 Folder view preferences lost when switching folders after upgrade to 8.2

Don't be so Sensitive! (or Dealing with Case Sensitivity when Populating the Profiles Database)

Mitch Cohen — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:01:26 +0000

Prior to reading this post you might want to take a quick read through my previous post Lotus Connections Profiles Population Wizard, What is Really Going On Under the Covers, which provides a more in depth understanding of the database population process, this post will cover using a custom Javascript function to manipulate data when populating the Profiles Database. In this example I will cover issues around Country Code, but this example can easily be extended to any other field in the Profiles Database.

One of the fields in a users Profile is their Country, a useful piece of information for a large organization with different locations around the world. First lets understand how the Country data is expected to display in a profile. Each user record contains a field "PROF_ISO_COUNTRY_CODE" and expects to be populated with a 2 letter value (Connections provides the ISO Standard Country codes with the Database Population Wizard, and that is what I will use in this example). When running the Profiles Population Wizard you have the opportunity to load the contents of "isocc.csv" which populates the standard country codes and the country names in to the "Country" table in the Profiles Database.

The default configuration for Profiles is to display the full country name when rendering a users profile (not simply the two letter ISO code), This is the line in the profiles-config.xml

"countryDisplayValue"

When a profile is loaded the system takes the 2 letter ISO code stored in "PROF_ISO_COUNTRY_CODE" in the EMPLOYEE table, and retrieves the full country name from the COUNTRY table, sounds simple, until you realize that it is all case sensitive. As you can see here all of the country codes are loaded in lower case

Now in my example I am feeding Profiles completely out of a Domino LDAP which is completely under my control as it is my sandbox, but in the real world you might be taking data in from other sources, an HR system for example where you can not dictate how they store data, so we need a more elegant solution then simply making sure the source data is in lower case. So in our example here is a view of a users ldap record (using LdapBrowser a very handy utility to keep around, scroll down on the page for the free client)

As you can see here the "c" attribute is populated with US in uppercase

If we simply use the default mapping in the Database Population Wizard

The user table will be populated in uppercase as seen here

Which means when we go in to Profiles and view Alex P. Keaton's Profile, we will not see his country displayed since US does not exist in the Country table (us is there but not US)

Not the result we were looking for. To fix this we are going to add a function in to 'profiles_functions.js' which is in the TDI Solutions Directory (TDIPopulation\TDISOL under the database Wizards directory) and here is the function I am adding (and bear in mind I am NOT a developer)

// Convert country field to lower case
function function_map_country_lowercase(fieldname) {
var result = work.getString("c");
if(result != null) {
result=result.toLowerCase();
}
return result;
}

Once you have saved your function, you can either manually edit the "map_dbrepos_from_source.properties" in the TDI Solutions Directory so it looks like this

PROF_ISO_COUNTRY_CODE={function_map_country_lowercase}

Or run the Wizard again and use the Function Pick list where you will see your new function as seen here

Once the wizard completes even though our source is still providing US in upper case we are writing us in lower case to the database

Now when we load up Alex P. Keaton's Profile we have his country displayed as we expected

This is just one example, using a custom Javascript you can easily manipulate any source data to write it out to the Profiles database correctly to suit your needs.

Additional Resources
Using the Profiles population wizard
Mapping fields manually
Tivoli Directory Integrator V6.1 InfoCenter
IBM Tivoli Directory Integrator Users Group