Happy Mid-Autumn Festival

To all the Chinese, wish you all a Happy Mid-Autumn Festival. Enjoy eating the mooncake.


Image from The Baker's Cottage

IBM Lotus Symphony

IBM just announced the released of IBM Lotus Symphony. It is a suite of free software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. I'm downloading it now and will try out the features soon. This offers an alternative solution for MS Office or the free version of Open Office. Personally, I have recommended people to use Open Office if they just need most basic function of office suite. For most day to day use, Open Office is more than sufficient. The best feature on Open Office that's missing in MS Office is PDF conversion. Lotus Symphony also providing that feature and supporting Open Document Format (ODF). So can Lotus Symphony live up to the expectation, download it and test it out. Check out Ed's for more info.

Portletize Lotus Notes Application - Part 2 (Multi-value separator)

Lotus Notes field allow us to set it to mutiple values. It can be set to take one or more separator values (space, comma, semicolon, new line and or blank line).

What happen when a field on the portal is map to a multiple value field in Notes? If we set comma is separator, even if the value in the portal contains a comma, it will be stored as a single value (eg "one, two") and not multi value (eg "one", "two").

Portlet Factory by default uses "|" as the separator which Notes does not support. After a few failed attempt to convert the separator, I manage to use an agent to do the job. In the Domino View & Form builder, there is an option "Run agent on save". This would call the agent to process the field before saving.

I know this is just a work around and there is a more efficient way to do it. At the Portlet Factory - Lotus Collaboration Forum, Sam have helped to answer the questions.



An Event Handler builder can be used. In the Event Name, select System:OnWebAppLoad. Then in the Actions, select the method setItemValueSeparator from your view. Set it to comma. This should automatically convert the field into a comma separated multi-value. At the moment, it does not support multiple separator (according to Sam in the forum). It would be useful if in the future version to support that and also as like in Notes, we can set which separator to use for display. Hoping to see the features in the future release.

Show-n-Tell Thursday Add to del.icio.us

Malaysia International Fireworks Competition - Grand Finale

For those who miss out the MIFC grand finale, click here for some pictures. It was indeed a colourful and beautiful extravaganza display of fireworks. I haven't seen so many design at such a hugh magnitude fireworks. It was definitely a good experience.