Sorting Hat - Embedded File Browser in the Lotus Notes Client UI - Flash Preview

06/11/2008 11:33 AM by Chris Toohey

So last night I played around with the Embedded Windows Explorer stuff that I mentioned yesterday and came up with the following - which I'm calling Sorting Hat:

View demo in full screen.

In this first really simple demo - we can see the embedded Microsoft Web Browser control, which is "activated" in the PostOpen event on the UI Form Design Element and uses the value stored in the url NotesItem of the NotesDocument. This allows us to not only access remotely-accessible file stores directly from a Lotus Notes client UI, but also allows drag-and-drop from this "widget" into the UI document - pretty slick!

View demo in full screen.

In this (yet again really simple) demo - we can see two embedded Microsoft Web Browser controls, again "activated" in the PostOpen event on the UI Form Design Element and that each use their own NotesItem from the NotesDocument for it's control (url and url2 respectively). The big difference in this example, you can drag-and-drop from one "widget" to another "widget" to move files across remote file stores - really slick!

Now, there are some issues with this approach that I'll get into in the next few days - the biggest being that the UI Document needs to be in Edit mode from what I can tell to run the Microsoft Web Browser control. I'm working around that stuff now and expect to have this example database available for download pretty soon!

Comment here with suggestions, thoughts, comments, and things that you want to see!