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Learning XPages Part 1 : Application Objectives

Tags : lotus domino xpages
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Welcome to the first in a series of blog entries on learning XPages to develop a simple application. In each part of this series of blog entries we will build, from scratch, a XPages based phonebook application with the resulting application being released on OpenNTF once it is complete. As I'm still learning XPages myself this should be a fascinating exploration into the capabilities of XPages and should help both myself and you, my readers, to get over the learning curve that is involved in learning XPages in Lotus Domino 8.5.

Building a phonebook application is probably one of the easiest applications you can create and phonebook applications can be found in many companies as part of their intranet in one form or another. For the purpose of this blog series I'll be keeping the application simple at first and then as the application progresses we can adding some advanced features. Lets have a look at some of the objectives that I've set for the application.

Xpages OneUI.
The base layout and look and feel is going to use the OneUI CSS that IBM has developed. This is the same look and feel that is used in the OpenNTF XPages Wiki application by Steve Castledine and is also similar to the look and feel that the Discussion template in 8.5 uses. I have been told that the discussion template may even be moving to the OneUI CSS in the 8.5.1 release but that remains to be seen. By using this OneUI we can quickly set a predefined look for the application and not have to worry about too much additional CSS.

Locations and People.
There will be two main data sources, the first being a 'location' document that stores the main contact information for an office, the office address, main fax number etc. and the second will be a 'person' document that will contain all the information about an individual person. The person document will also contain a field which specifies which location the person belongs to.

Editable profiles.
When a user is logged in they should have the ability to edit their own person document so that they can update their details. This could be linked to a configuration setting so that the application owner can disable this ability.

Notes client interface.
The notes client interface will be developed using the Java Views to provide a similar look and feel to the Xpages Wiki template. This will probably be the last thing that will be done to the application as the main interface will be the XPages part.

Domino Addressbook Sync Agent.
Finally we'll look at creating an agent that will keep the phonebook up-to-date with the names found in the Domino Directory. Again this will be done in the final stages as we'll mainly be concentrating on the XPages parts.

So there you have it, a rough plan for the objectives of the XPages phonebook application. In the next part of this series we'll look at creating the initial OneUI layout in XPages and then after that we'll adding the data sources to the Xpages and linking them all together.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Great stuff Dec. I look forward to the upcoming blog entires on this application. I was not familiar with the OneUI stuff but hopefully I soon will be.

Good stuff!

Gravatar Image2 - Dec, this will be great. Looking forward to it.

Gravatar Image3 - Dec:

Thanks for letting us all in on this, should be a great ride.

Gravatar Image4 - Dec, wow. This is where I can pick up XPages skill.

Gravatar Image5 - @Declan

thanks for the information and teh work... this is a great page for new developers who just started with xPages...

Many thanks Emoticon

Gravatar Image6 - Excellent work Dec. We will be following from our offices. Thank you very much

In spanish:
Excelente trabajo Dec. Nosotros lo estaremos siguiendo desde nuestras oficinas. Muchas gracias