Mindoo Blog - Cutting edge technologies - About Java, Lotus Notes and iPhone

  • The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    Karsten Lehmann  22 July 2010 22:32:43
    We just received permission to blog about a new article that we wrote for THE VIEW and that went online today. The article demonstrates several interesting techniques that can be used for Notes client and DDE plugin development. It includes a new display area in DDE that shows the LotusScript.doc content for the currently selected design element.

    Here is the public abstract and the download link for the plugin. Of course, we highly recommend that you get a subscription for THE VIEW if you're not a subscriber yet.


    Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins

    Improve, accelerate, and streamline the Domino application development process by adding custom Eclipse extensions to Domino Designer on Eclipse (DDE). Find out how to add a handy development tool - LotusScript documentation support - to DDE and learn techniques and tricks that you can reuse for your own plug-in development.
    Moving IBM Lotus Domino Designer to the Eclipse platform has opened a new world of extensibility and customizability opportunities to developers. No longer restricted to using error-prone C add-in development to add features to Designer, you can now write Eclipse plug-ins for Domino Designer on Eclipse (DDE) 8.5 and above, taking advantage of a variety of Eclipse and DDE extension points to add functionality for both UI and back-end logic.

    Image:The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    Using Eclipse APIs, you can create a wide range of helpful tools, like the batch processing of design elements and one-click imports of frequently used script libraries. You can even customize Designer’s user interface - for example, add your own design element properties to the property panel (like the width and height in pixels of image resources).

    We’ll provide a useful example of using Eclipse APIs to enhance DDE as we take you through the steps for integrating LotusScript doc (LSDoc) support into DDE. LSDoc is a very popular development tool created by Mikkel Heisterberg that generates well-formatted code documentation for LotusScript, similar to Javadoc for the Java language. Version 2 of LSDoc has been completely rewritten in Java, so it integrates better into the Java-based Eclipse world - it is faster, scales better with large database designs, and it can be seamlessly used in Eclipse plug-ins.
    LSDoc generates HTML files for LotusScript documentation and stores them in a Notes database. However, it does not provide a mechanism to display those files. The files are served by the local Web preview of DDE, which requires Anonymous access to the LSDoc database; otherwise, the LSDoc database needs to be placed on a Domino server, which is not an option if you need to use LSDoc offline. In addition, there is no direct integration into Domino Designer yet. The documentation has to be opened in a separate browser window.

    We’ll show you how you can solve these two issues by creating a new DDE/Eclipse feature that carries its own Web server and displays the LSDoc content for the currently selected design element in a new visual area of DDE, an Eclipse ViewPart.

    Download link (source code and binary distribution):
    DDE_LSDoc_Plugin.zip

    Full article version (subscription required):
    Article on eview.com


    Comments

    1Stephan H. WIssel  23.07.2010 3:37:49  The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    Excellent!

    Suggestion: Put the installable on an Update site (OpenNTF could accommodate you there), so future updates are automatically deployed.

    One idea for the presentation: if you do an XPages UI it will work in a Local Notes client too.

    2Ulrich Krause  13.12.2010 11:00:32  The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    fantastic! Will be part of my EntwicklerCamp 2011 presentation.

    3Andrew Magerman  14.01.2015 11:39:19  The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    Hi Karsten,

    Thanks, as always, for your excellent resources. I'm trying to develop a DDE plugin and decided to shamelessly copy your work to start up. I've managed to set up Eclipse Ganymede, Lotus Expeditor, but I'm having issues finding the required IBM plugins for the MANIFEST file.

    In previous versions this was

    com.ibm.designer.domino.ui.commons

    com.ibm.designer.domino.ide.resources

    but I can't find them in the Notes 9.0.1 environment.

    Do you know this?

    4Karsten Lehmann  09.02.2015 23:27:51  The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    Hi Andrew,

    sorry for the late response. Unfortunately I have not found the time to check this out yet (week full of projects). My current dev environment on Windows uses 9.0, not 9.0.1, because for most of our applications, we don't need the newest API features (OSGi + Notes.jar is enough).

    But maybe the plugin is also not working in 9.0, I still need to test it.

    I just wanted to let you know that I have not forgotten your comment :-).

    5Karsten Lehmann  09.02.2015 23:31:15  The View article: Add LSDoc Support to Domino Designer on Eclipse with Custom Plug-ins (download link included)

    What I know is that some Expeditor internals changed in R9 regarding Drag&Drop behavior, so it looks like IBM is still working on the client, at least a bit.