Andrew Pollack's Blog

Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise

Some code I used to save time with creation of an ugly backward compatibility hack

By Andrew Pollack on 06/21/2005 at 01:16 PM EDT

I had to create a form to be used by R5 clients and part of the form had to display a variable number of urls, with an image used for the bullet. The data had to be written from a COM call outside Notes, and the form stored with the mail send. Ugliness all around. I decided that to get the job done without overall complexity getting the better of the project, I would just have 100 fields, hidden when empty, each prefaced with the image. Of course, in R5 you didn't have "@This..." functions, so you have to hand create all 100 fields -- and if you don't get it just write, do it again.

Instead, I create an empty database with just one form on it, and on that form I create just one of the fields and its prefaced image. Then I used the sample DXL export routine from the help file and dumped that sample database to disk. By opening the resultant xml file in a text editor, I found the code for the field. It was like this:

<pardef id='1'><code event='hidewhen'><formula>targetlink1 = ""</formula></code></pardef><par def='1'><picture width='12px' height='17px' scaledheight='0.1771in' scaledwidth='0.1250in'><jpeg>/9j/4AA{content deleted}/2Q==</jpeg></picture><urllink showborder='false'><code event='value'><formula>targetlink1</formula></code><run><font color='system'/> </run><run><font color='blue'/><field type='text' kind='computed' name='link1'><code event='defaultvalue'><formula>displaylink1</formula></code></field></run><run><font color='system'/></run></urllink></par>

Next, I created some LotusScript to duplicate that string, only substitute the next numeric for the fieldname used in the field properties and all the formulae. Finally, just copied the repeated text into the original dxl, and again using nothing but the sample code from the help file imported that dxl into a new database. Once I had the database reconstituted, I opened the form, copied all 100 fields, and pasted them into the form I was working on.

Ok, its a nasty hack -- but it saved me a TON painstaking, error prone work.


There are  - loading -  comments....



Other Recent Stories...

  1. 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ...... 
  2. 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ...... 
  3. 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ...... 
  4. 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server 
  5. 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned 
  6. 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me! 
  7. 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.  
  8. 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino? 
  9. 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back. 
  10. 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws 
Click here for more articles.....


pen icon Comment Entry
Subject
Your Name
Homepage
*Your Email
* Your email address is required, but not displayed.
 
Your thoughts....
 
Remember Me  

Please wait while your document is saved.