Creating Form Design Element Sidebar Widgets

07/11/2008 11:27 AM by Chris Toohey

Here's a 52 second Jing videocast showing how you can add a Lotus Notes Form as a Sidebar Widget. Once you check that out... you may be interested in what went into the design of said Form Design Element.

I'll use SOTU v0.2 as my example here, so if you haven't already, go download it so you can play along at home...

So first, I created a pretty simple Form Design Element named "sidebar_remotecommand":

Pretty simple stuff. SaveOptions prevents the Form from being saved back to the database, and my Process button looks like this:

Sub Click(Source As Button)

	

	Dim s As New NotesSession

	Dim w As New NotesUIWorkspace

	Dim db As NotesDatabase

	Dim doc As NotesDocument

	Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument

	Dim vw As NotesView

	Dim scol As NotesDocumentCollection

	Dim sdoc As NotesDocument

	

	Set db = s.CurrentDatabase

	Set uidoc = w.CurrentDocument

	Set doc = uidoc.Document

	Set vw = db.GetView("servers")

	

	Forall server In doc.GetItemValue("servername")

	 

	 Set scol = vw.GetAllDocumentsByKey(server, True)

	 Set sdoc = scol.GetFirstDocument

	 

	 Call genResponse(sdoc, Cstr(server), doc.GetItemValue("command")(0))

	 

	End Forall

	

	Call uidoc.FieldSetText("servername", 
"")

	Call uidoc.FieldSetText("command", "")

	Call uidoc.Refresh

	

End Sub

... yeah, that's about it. I blank out the fields and refresh the UI so that the "reports" from the processed remote console requests are displayed directly in the widget.

This is an EXTREMELY powerful combination of current subject expertise and this new entry-point into our applications - I'm now running around like a madman creating RAD widgets for all of our applications without the need to ramp-up on Java Sidebar Application development.