XPages Options for Development in a Team

There are some (new?) interesting options you should know about if you develop with xpages, especially when developing in a team. I just stumbled onto it, and it explains a lot of weird problems with a coworker.

Manually recompile xpages is especially helpful, because if you save your custom control, every dependency is recompiled. If you work on a server and another colleague does something similar, you might be ending up with a big mess of classes that do not match each other, and not even recognize this (and the errors resulting from this are not very helpful, too).

Additionally i found it quite annoying to get the id of labels instead of the actual code, so this is fixed now, too. Joy!

Logout from your XPage in a Nutshell

Have you ever struggled to provide a quick & easy logout link for your XPage-based web site? There are many JavaScript (both Server-Side and Client-Side) solutions, but this is, what works best for me, and its the simplest, plain solution i could come up with:

Just put "./?logout" in your link text, and you are done!

For convenience, you can easily add "&redirectTo=yourFavouriteSite", or compute that part.

Creating Percentage Totals for Every Line in Views

Using percentages, it is just not possible to create a correct value for every row in a view, if you are aggregating upwards.

Here is an Example: Calculating the revenue change in comparison to the last year, displaying as percent.

As all amounts are summed up, they could not be automatically be compared and written as a percentage using notes mechanisms (if you go on and sum up the percentage values, you end up with terrible off numbers, contact me if you have a better alternative).

So here is a nice workaround:

Using a $$ViewTemplateDefault (or $$ViewTemplate for FormName), the view can be opened in a web container (even in notes, using Single Sign-On) and use the following code in the "onLoad" event to dynamically update the percentages in the row, and you are done.

In my example i use one column containing the absolute sums, accumulated over categories, from the last year, and the amount of change (you could easily adapt the code to work for absolute last year versus absolute this year).

//nodes are differently styled with font / b etc
function innerText(node){
 while(node && node.firstChild)
  node=node.firstChild;
 if(node && node.data)
  return node.data;
 else
  return '';
}

function setInnerText(node,text,styleColor){
 if(!node)
  return;
 while(node.firstChild)
  node=node.firstChild;
 node.data=text;
 if(node.parentNode&&node.parentNode.style)
  node.parentNode.style.color=styleColor;
}

//get url param
function getUrlParam( name )
{
 name = name.replace(/[\[]/,"\\\[").replace(/[\]]/,"\\\]");

 var regexS = "[\\?&]"+name+"=([^&#]*)";
 var regex = new RegExp( regexS );
 var results = regex.exec( window.location.href );

 if ( results == null )
  return "";
 else
  return results[1];
}

// get the table
table = document.getElementsByTagName('table')[0];
//leftmost cell is usually merged if categorized
//so count from the right side
lastYearColFromRight = 10;
changeColFromRight = 4;
outputColFromRight = 2;

if(table){
 //first row is header
 for (i = 1; i < table.rows.length; i += 1) {
    row = table.rows[i];

    len = row.cells.length;
    num = innerText(row.cells[len-lastYearColFromRight]);
    lastYear = Number((num==""|num==null)?0:num);
    change = Number(innerText(row.cells[len-changeColFromRight]));
    //do not divide by zero
    if(lastYear==0){
     percent = 0;
     if(change!=null)
      //output absolute amounts if last year was zero
      outString=change.toFixed(2)+" A";
     else
      outString="0.00 %";
    }
    else{
      percent=(change/lastYear)*100
     outString=percent.toFixed(2)+' %';
    }
    // determine cell color
    color=percent<0?'red':'black';
    //set value
    setInnerText(row.cells[len-outputColFromRight],outString,color);
 }
}