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HCL Domino 12.0.2, Engage 2022 and HCL Factory tour Milan

 I haven't published my recap after Engage this year and the recent HCL Factory tour in Milan is a great opportunity to write a summary about what's happening in HCL (mostly Domino) space. It's a mix of news about 12.0.2, future directions, and my impressions, so it can be a bit chaotic, but I got the impression that many people see it similarly.  Engage 2022 Engage 2022 was great (as always). I love the atmosphere in Brudges. I visited it once after Engage a few years ago and I was happy to come back. This was also the first time I had the opportunity to speak at Engage, which obviously made it a bit more stressful, but also more fun. Together with Domino Jams, HCL continued conversations with customers and partners about the future of their products at Engage. Many of these ideas were now discussed in greater detail in Milan, some of them were even demoed.  My main takeaways from Engage were: Nomad (web and mobile) are a great addition to Notes family Restyle is a great g
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XPages and RichText (part I) - ACF

 This post is long overdue. I originally planned to write it to document the issues and solutions while working on the app, but as the problems kept appearing I wanted to make sure that I have all the answers. Now I know that I probably won't have them in the near future as I'm seeing new issues even after having the app in production for some time.  The project was about a webization of an existing app that served well in Notes client UI for many years. It's a classic support/helpdesk app that once used to be a great example of Notes flexibility and integration of mail functions with app code. After all the mail database was just another app using the same APIs (mostly). Unfortunately, this is not the case for XPages as iNotes or Verse has nothing in common with XPages, so the APIs are not battle-tested for all the scenarios. I remember doing a similar project during the early days of XPages and I must admit that it was more painful, but mostly due to a lack of community
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HCL Domino 12.0.1 Comparison tool quick-fix for XSP

 I finally found an opportunity to try the new Database comparison tool that comes with 12.0.1 -  official documentation . Unfortunately, it did not work for me - all I got was a report for database.xml comparison and an error: Unable to output because no output object has been specified //DDDESIGNELEM.SAVE:1184-6 ... cc_body_xsp.xml ... My setup is: 12.0.1 - of course on Windows database configured to use WinMerge for comparison The error mentioned a Custom Control and the code contains a special if for *.xsp. After a bit of checking of the source code it seems that my problem can be fixed with a simple line that sets the output of the midDomp object - line 1117 on the screenshot. Now it outputs results for all elements and no errors anymore. Now I can continue to check the reports. Update: There is an official support article for this problem -  https://support.hcltechsw.com/csm?id=kb_article&sysparm_article=KB0096095  (but without a fix)
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Quick Tip - SSJS Error line numbers

 Recently, I had to work on an app with a pretty huge server-side JavaScript codebase. Several developers with different levels of XPages knowledge worked on that project in the past, to the code is quite hard to follow. My suggestion to rewrite all the code to Java was not accepted, so we have to deal with SSJS for now. One of the most annoying things, when you work with SSJS, is that in many cases you don't know where an error is happening. If you keep things simple and allow redirection to an error page (default or custom), you get a lot of information, and usually, you don't want to scare users with that or you may even want to do something useful in a catch block to recover from the problem. If the problem is thrown directly in the XPages JS engine, it's usually an InterpretException, which contains the context information, but if you have to deal with standard Java exceptions, you don't have it. Imagine a simple scenario with a function in a ssjs lib. When you run
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Domino CI build with Jenkins and Docker

 I wanted to make this work for a very long time, but there were always some parts missing, so I could not get the full process running. Finally, the wait is over. The following paragraphs describe a way to build Notes/Domino apps automatically on a Jenkins server, allowing parallel builds and all "normal" continuous-integration behavior, without having to think too much about Domino specifics. The Problem Until now, I was running my automated builds of Domino apps using Jenkins in two ways: The official headless-designer way, where you need to pass special commands to Domino Designer and hope for the best as the Designer sometimes gets stuck. I have this wrapped inside a Jenkins pipeline, so I have some control and can e.g. avoid parallel builds by using locks on Jenkins, but still, sometimes it just dies. Some of my headless builds run for more than 30 minutes, so it's really hard to quickly spot an issue without actually connecting to the machi
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Domino transaction method testing update

 2021 is here. I hope this year will be full of better things and our lives will get to normal, where we can travel and meet each other again. For me, it started in quarantine, but all tests were negative. Another change was that I'm HCL Ambassador for the very first time in 2021. I hope it will force me to blog and speak even more about HCL products, especially about all the goodies in V12 and beyond.  Last year, I've done a few tests of the new transaction methods. HCL checked my issues, so now it was my turn to do a few more tests. Problem with view access after a document save In Test 4 of my initial tests, I've found that you can no longer access views after you save a document. The problem seems to be deeper in the Domino code, so for now you must disable autoupdate on the view object.  This, of course, means that you will not get up-to-date result, because you'll work with the old view index. An interesting fact is, that the view index is not updated even when
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Testing new Domino 12 transaction methods

 Domino V12 EAP contains new methods to manage code transactions. The underlying C API has been there for quite some time, but I've never really looked at it. Now it's finally official and you will be able to leverage these new features in your apps. The EAP program is currently only shipped as a Docker container, which makes the testing a bit hard - you don't have Domino Designer or easy access to the JVM. The only ways to test the APIs that I could think of were: Try to import the code using DXL on the server - should work for LotusScript Try server-side XPages compilation, e.g. using Jesse's NSF ODP Tooling Build a jar file locally using V12 Notes.jar and reuse that The last option seemed to be the easiest one and before I had a chance to try it, Ulrich Krause has used that in his test with Java server addin -  https://www.eknori.de/2020-11-01/testing-new-database-methods-in-domino-v12-early-access-without-domino-designer-v12/ I wanted to have something more interact
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