wissel.net

Building a fieldset custom control

Stephan H Wissel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:10:00 +0000

HTML has widely used and more exotic tags. Fieldset and Legend being of the later type. Theo reminded me, that they can be useful and asked how to incorporate them into a XPage. The best approach is to create a custom control with custom parameters and an editable area inside and simply type the html controls into the source code. The legend is rendered by a computed field, so translation will be able to pick it up.

The source code of the XPage looks like this (note: the custom property doesn't show up here since it is stored in a file hidden from the Domino Designer perspective):
<xp:view xmlns:xp="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core"> <fieldset> <legend> <xp:text escape="false" id="legendText" value="#{javascript:compositeData.legendText}"> xp:text> legend> <xp:callback facetName="facetFieldSetContent" id="callbackFieldControlSet" /> fieldset> xp:view>
When using the custom control in a XPage or another control it looks like this (note the content inside the "this.facets") is what you put in there. can be a panel or table with fields in it or another control.
><xp:view xmlns:xp="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core" xmlns:xc="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/custom"> <xc:FieldSetControl id="MyFieldSet"> <xc:this.legendText>This is the <b>legend</b> textxc:this.legendText> <xp:this.facets> <xp:panel xp:key="facetFieldSetContent" id="stuffInsideTheFieldSet"> <xp:label id="label1" for="inputText1" value="Test Field"> xp:label> <xp:inputText id="inputText1" /> xp:panel> xp:this.facets> xc:FieldSetControl> xp:view>
As usual: YMMV

No more DIV tag hacks in XPages to get your favorite Dojo Widget

Stephan H Wissel — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:55:30 +0000

Domino 8.5.1 went into controlled beta recently. While others do performance testing provide us with and performance tips I poked around detail improvements. One of the early tips to integrate dojo components into XPages is to use a DIV wrapper. In 8.5.1 this is no longer necessary, since you now can specify dojoType and dojoAttributes directly on a panel (and some other custom controls). A nice step to cleaner code

Minimizing your server downtime when upgrading

Stephan H Wissel — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:42:35 +0000

We all love upgrades. They steal the nights, the weekends and the public holidays. But it doesn't have to be that way. For this post let us presume you are running Domino 6.x and want to upgrade to Domino 8.5. While Domino 8.5 can very well run on the same hardware specification as a Domino 6.x server, your server is showing its age and anyway is to small for the data growth you experienced during the last 5 years. So you bought a new box. With that you can get away with a downtime of 10 seconds in 6 easy steps (or phases). Here you go:

Phase 0
This is where you are now. That phase had a duration of 5 years and ends with the management approval to buy a new box and its delivery to your ~~closet~~ data center.
Phase 1
You install and configure a brand new Domino R8.5 server with a new server.id and a new IP address. In our sample that server is called tmpServer/YourOrg at IP 10.34.21.88. Make sure to check the following:
- You make that new R8.5 server the directory server of your Domino Directory
- You have added CREATE_R85_DATABASES=1 to the notes.ini and made the server a member of LocalDomainServers and/or your server group. You have checked all databases to include the group as manager in the ACL
- You made sure that the new server has the same access (ACL level, roles) to your databases like the existing one
- You replicate all databases from your existing server to the new server
- You verified (using document counts) that all documents indeed have been replicated
- The server document allows only a group "UpgradeProject" access to the new R8.5 server. This group contains LocalDomainServers and the team that does the upgrade
- You copy both server ids to each of the servers
Duration: Anything between a few hours and a few days during regular working hours.
Phase 2
You unplug the network cable from the new server, shut down the Domino server. You edit the IP configuration of the server to use the existing server's IP address (this is why you unplugged the cable in the first place). You edit the server's notes.ini and point to the existing server.id to be used. Check the notes.ini if you need to set more parameters (e.g. network port addresses for partitioned servers etc.). Restart your server but keep it unplugged.

Duration: 5-10 minutes (depending on how long your server needs to boot), best during off-peak hours since Phase 3 needs to follow immediately.
Phase 3 (The Downtime)
Best you do that together unless the boxes are close to each other. You type in the Domino server console: Set Config Server_Restricted=1 (thx Thomas) and Drop ALL (If you are a nice guy you warned your users with a broadcast message before you do that. Remember: a (!) sends the broadcast to a dialog box). Your server is now clean of users and no user session can be opened. Pull out the network cable and plug in the network cable of your new server. Since the server name and the IP address is the same as the old server before no other configuration needs to be done. You are back in business.

Duration: 10 sec (If you type and plug fast even shorter).
Phase 4
You edit the notes.ini of your old server and point to the temporary server.id. You edit the IP address of the server to point to the temporary IP address. You remove the Server_Restriced line from the notes.ini. You shutdown the server, plug the network cable back in and reboot it. A final replication with the new server makes sure that anything created in Phase 2 is back where it belongs. You have full working access to the "old" databases now.

Duration: Take your time. Check everything.
Phase 5
Everything worked out, you reformat your old server and give it a new lease of life.

Update

Gangsters, Thugs, Thiefs and Media Users

Stephan H Wissel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:47:24 +0000

I like movies. My family and I go to the cinema quite often (a movie is only half the fun without the coke and the popcorn) and we own quite a number of VCDs and DVDs. What p****s me off more and more: in every movie I get a advertisement about how bad "burning movies" is. Every DVD starts with an FBI warning telling me: "Hey you spend your money with us, but we tell you you probably are a thug". Grab any DVD from a Bangkok street vendor and you are not bothered by advertisement you can't skip or a warning about your obvious criminal intend. I don't mind to pay for media I watch, but I very much mind being called a potential criminal after I actually paid due to greed (?) of the media industry. Economy of abundance anyone?

How saving a few cent will loose you big bucks - HSBC Internet Banking Blues

Stephan H. Wissel — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 23:58:38 +0000

I'm a customer of a number of banks. HSBC being one of them. I also hardly visit any bank branches. I do my business online. I like HSBC's site. It is easy to use and fully functional (Short of a glitch that doesn't allow to set a date for all type of transactions). In recent years all the banks have added additional security to their online login by requiring a security token besides your user name and password. This token is either generated by a little gadget or send via SMS to your mobile phone. HSBC choose the first option (while some smarter banks actually let you choose what option you like). The token vendor they picked seems to be on the cheap site and with 99% probability the devices' internal clock will get out of sync with the security server (about every 2-3 month), so you can't login. A call to the help-desk fixes that, but it takes 3-4 hours.
In other words: you can't depend on the availability of HSBC Internet banking when you need or want it. I chatted a little with the help desk guy who was very pleasant to talk to and highlighted that this problem dents HSBC's reputation. So I asked if I'm just dumb out of luck or the problem is widespread. He admitted, that *all* HSBC Internet banking customers will experience that type of problem (Guess that's why there was a specific option in the voice menu just for that). I'm now seriously considering to close my account since I'm not amused. All other bank tokens I use(d) never fail(ed).
Note to HSBC: Fix the problem or loose customers

How to be happy in business

Stephan H Wissel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 15:04:00 +0000

Bud Caddell likes bubbles just like me. He has a very compelling view How to be happy in business. It makes rounds and is available in German already. I love the graphic, I jusr didn't like the colors, so here you go:

(Click on the image for a highres version)

Thought for the day

Stephan H Wissel — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:20:33 +0000

When you look in the wrong direction, you don't see it coming! (Original picture here)

Genting Highlands Resort Reflections

Stephan H Wissel — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:35:23 +0000

After exploring Kuantan and Sungei Lembing we continued our personal Discover Malaysia trip to Genting Highlands Theme Park. After having seen the orginal a number of times it was obvious where Genting's inspiration came from (Wasn't there something with "flattery"). They have to practice with their website however. With NoScript active you don't see a thing. The theme park is divided into an indoor and an outdoor area (tribute to the weather here) with the indoor area actually containing a number of rides including a ferries wheel and a roller coaster. After the beach and nature in Kuantan that felt a bit creepy. But it operates well. SWMBO went - what Genting is all about - gambling and won the family dinner last night. One of my favorites are animal pictures. The body of a snake (a must have accessory over here) is muscle pure - quite a stretch target for my gym exercise.

Of course the main attraction of any theme park are the rides. Genting has a number of them: The Corkscrew, Space Shot, Sky Venture (a body flying tower, very cool, Flying Coaster, Snow World (the only way to see snow in the tropics) and more. All of them are pretty new and feature impressive structures.

However when you embark on a ride on the Cyclops you enjoy Malaysia's first roller coaster ever,

Picking your routing and replication architecture

Stephan H Wissel — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:38:00 +0000

Routing and replication is a core function of the Domino server. There are a few basic facts you need to consider when setting them up. A very popular setup, which I quite like too, is a hub spoke architecture: a central spoke communicates with spokes, so any communication has a maximum of 2 hops. An additional advantage of such an architecture is, that a server only needs to "see" the hub to reach any of the other servers. But even for a hub-spoke architecture there is room for improvement. Let us make two assumptions: the hub is where your SMTP mails arrive and depart (so "hub" could be a cluster) and all servers can see each other on the network.

Mail Routing
The normal Hub-Spoke routing has the advantage, that every email message is delivered with the maximum of 2 hops and that you only need 2 connection documents per server. It also works independent from network architecture or IP ranges.

Of course - you need connection documents and every message will use 2 hops. If you have a lot of large internal traffic you create a bottleneck at the hub (even with multiple mailboxes). When all Domino servers "see" each other direct routing will be more efficient. To setup direct routing you need to put all participating Domino server into the same Notes Named Network (which implies that they all share the same network protocol - not an issue with TCP/IP everywhere today). You won't need connection documents anymore and routing is instant and direct.

Are there reasons (beside obviously wanting of the prerequisites) why you wouldn't want to use direct routing? When you use your hub to perform central functions like virus scan, content integrity, enterprise archival, compliance check etc. you want every message to pass through your hub. Be careful what you wish for, you might just create your next bottleneck.
Replication
Replication comes with many choices: What server starts it, pull only, push only, pull-pull, pull-push. So it can get a little confusing (should I draw a diagram for you?). Hub Spoke replication architectures make a lot of sense. With 2 cycles all replicas are current. This is especially important for your system documents. However you need to be clear about how you set it up. The typical setup is the hub server to be scheduled to replicate with the spokes. From the 2 options: pull-pull and pull-push we find mostly pull-push. This means the hub does all the work.

Since the hub doesn't do anything else (eventually run some central agents?), that seems a sensible choice. However it has a large pitfall. By default there is one replicator up and running per server. So your Hub is replicating with one spoke at a time. You can increase that number to 4 but you will with large changeset and many spokes run out of your replication time window. On the other side of a replication there is just another user session (watch your console, you will find: "Session opened for server Hub/MyCorp"). So when you turn the replication direction around it scales much better.

When you schedule a pull-push replication on every hub, you can schedule all replications at the same time, since they are just sessions on the hub. You still will need 2 cycles to have all documents on all servers. Why would you not want to do that? 2 potential reasons (one stronger, one weaker) come to mind: firstly since all spokes push documents to the hub at the same time the peak utilization of the indexer on the hub goes up and might slow down other functions temporarily (time critical agents?); secondly replication is a bit "messier" the spokes might get some of the updated documents already in the first cycle instead of the second, if your application relies on sets of documents (Lotus Workflow comes to my mind) you end up with some documents "missing" until the completion of the second cycle. Other than that Spoke Hub replication is your method of choice.

As usual YMMV.

Gartenzwerge* Chinese Edition

Stephan H Wissel — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:46:17 +0000

Germany is well know for its Garden Dwarft culture. Now I discovered, that the Chinese too have them!

There was more to see in that monastery garden. A collection of statues (I need to find out what they mean) that invite to contemplate.

* Garden Dwarfs.