During the XPages Markup Ultra Combos article yesterday, I showed a simple HTML5 Video Element Custom Control. While it would have worked as shown, I took into consideration a few things - specifically that you could have more than 2 media types depending on the specific browser (and browser version) you're using - so I redesigned it.

Here's the updated version of an HTML5 Video Element Custom Control...

Click here for the complete article and online demo...

An Action Bar for an application user interface -- especially applications on the IBM Lotus Notes/Domino platform -- are an established standard. You need a place for your common actions, to easily create and update NotesData, and ultimately drive the user focus for any major operations in your application.

This article will show you how you can easily add an Action Bar to an XPage viewPanel, and have it display nicely with things like Pagers to give your application a more rich feel...

(Click thru for the complete article...)

The OpenNTF.org Extension Library (often referred to as ExtLib) is an absolutely must-have set of controls that can be used to quickly create some pretty amazing XPage applications. There are, however, limitations -- more due to the way things work than the technology or developers contributing to the ExtLib -- that can cause confusion and in some cases downright frustration!

I ran into one of those recently with my team, as we wanted to use the ExtLib Dialog control to surface a simple File Upload form. As you can probably guess from the name, this form stores files.

Putting the contents of an XPage inside of an ExtLib Dialog control is quite frankly a rather simple thing. What is not simple however is trying to use that Dialog'ed-form to save multi-type content back to a given NotesDocument.

Note: this is a rather long article. As such, I've created anchor links to the 11 minute YouTube video walkthru of the XPage demo application and techniques discussed here, or for those of you who prefer a more hands-on approach, you can simply jump right into the Dailog File Upload Controls -- Online XPage App Demo!

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IBM Lotus Notes and Domino XPage developers - like any developers - hate documentation. Most applications are lucky to have comments in the code, but how can we add documentation to Custom Controls? This quick article shows you one technique that might do the trick!

I rarely use the Design Pane when developing XPage apps. I just feel more at home hand-writing the XSP markup anymore. I can never seem to get the drag-and-drop working. Double-clicking often sends the control outside of the target where I could have sworn my cursor last was. And there's absolutely nothing like jumping directly into the XSP markup via the Source pane and making it do what you need it to do!

But I know a lot of XPage developers still use the Design pane, so this one is mostly for you...

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When I was invited to speak at the XPages Guru webinar earlier this month to help jumpstart June as the Learn XPages month... I was assigned a rather interesting subject: defining a roadmap for IBM Lotus Notes Domino Application Developers to XPages.

Armed with 5 slides (4 if you discard the intro/cover) and approximately 7 minutes of the hour-long webinar, I attempted to convey my individual experience both with learning XPages and what I believe are the key factors in learning and successfully employing XPages in your daily application development efforts.

(Click thru for the complete article...)