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.
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
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