AASHQ Domino blog

Fix full text search results within PDF and DocX documents

Ferdi Verlaan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 14:56:31 +0200

We found that several installations of Lotus Domino 8.5.1 and 8.5.2 had issues when searching a full-text indexed database with attachment conversion filters turned on. When searching for content within the attachment, no results were displayed.

This is due to a wrong characterset in the keyview settings. This can be fixed by adding the following notes.ini entries:

FT_BINARY_FILTER_OFF=0
OS400_KEYVIEW_CSID=0052
PLATFORM_CSID=052

Where 0052 stands for ISO 1252 West European Latin.
For more information see this page.

After changing the ini-settings, restart the server and completely remove the FT-index and then re-create it. Attachments will be searchable again.

Google sitemap agent and update it to Google with a ’ping’ service

Ferdi Verlaan — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 15:41:46 +0200

Google has a cool little website called 'Google Webmaster tools' located at: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

One of the features of Webmaster tools is the possibility to upload the sitemap of your site. This will improve the indexing of your website. A Google sitemap is a XML file which has the following structure:

<urlset xmlns="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">
<url>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/dir/page.htmlloc>
<lastmod>2010-10-27lastmod>
<priority>1priority>
url>
urlset>

Dynamic sitemap
We want to update this sitemap automatically with a Lotusscript agent when we create or modify a page. We have created a view called 'vw-web-Sitemap' which has the structure of our content in it in hierachical format. It loops through the view, get the field 'urlkey_seo' and the last modified date and places them in the XML. The field 'urlkey_seo' contains the actual path of the page (ex: /products/coolproduct1/specs).

We created a small function to get the date in the correct format (yy-mm-dd). In our case we use three templates (forms), and we give a different priority to it, the homepage should be 1 (high), our products should have a priority of 0.8, and all other pages should have a priority of 0.5 (medium).

The agent has the following code:

%REM
Agent web-GoogleSitemap
Created Oct 27, 2010 by Ferdi Verlaan/Aas
Description: Creates a google sitemap from the content of the sitemap view
%END REM
Option Public
Option Declare

Sub Initialize

On Error GoTo errh

Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim view As NotesView
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Dim rel As String

Set db = session.Currentdatabase
Set view = db.Getview("vw-web-Sitemap")
Set doc = view.Getfirstdocument()

'header information for XML
Print {Content-Type: application/xml"}
Print {}
Print {
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84
http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84/sitemap.xsd">}

Do Until doc Is Nothing

If doc.Form(0) = "cnt-Diensten" Then
rel = "0.8"
elseIf doc.Form(0) = "cnt-Start" Then
rel = "1"
Else
rel = "0.5"
End If

Print {}
Print {http://www.aashq.nl} & doc.urlkey_seo(0) & {}
Print {} & genDate(doc) & {}
Print {} & CStr(rel) &{}
Print {}

Set doc = view.Getnextdocument(doc)
Loop

Print {}

Exit Sub

errh:
Print "Error on line " & Erl & " - " & Err & " - " & Error & " in "& GetThreadInfo(1)
Exit Sub

End Sub

%REM
Function lenDate
Description: checks the length of the day or month value
%END REM
Function lenDate(ndt As String) As string

If Len(ndt) = 1 Then
lenDate = "0" + ndt
Else
lenDate = ndt
End If

End Function
%REM
Sub genDate
Description: Creates a yy-mm-dd date string
%END REM
Function genDate(doc As NotesDocument) As string

Dim ndt As New NotesDateTime(CStr(doc.LastModified))
Dim y As String
Dim m As String
Dim d As string

y = CStr(Year(CStr(ndt.Lslocaltime)))
m = lenDate(CStr(Month(CStr(ndt.Lslocaltime))))
d = lenDate(CStr(Day(CStr(ndt.Lslocaltime))))

genDate = y + "-" + m + "-" + d

Exit Function

End Function

This agent will create a nice XML output for Google Sitemaps. You can submit it to Google with Webmaster tools > Siteconfiguration > Sitemaps.

Ping sitemap
After submission Google will index the sitemap periodically, but wouldn't it be great to let Google now that the sitemap has been updated? That is possible through a special PING website of Google. The url of this ping service is: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping? and then the url of your sitemap.

We have created a ping agent for Lotus Notes which automatically runs after a modification or creating of a new document.
The agent code is listed below (works only from Windows):

%REM
Agent web-pingSitemap
Created Nov 11, 2010 by Ferdi Verlaan/Aas
Description: Pings the sitemap to Google services
%END REM
Option Public
Option Declare

Sub Initialize
Dim result As String
result = pingSitemap("http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/website.nsf/web-GoogleSitemap.xml")
End Sub

Function pingSitemap(strUrl As String) As String

Dim oHTTP As Variant
Dim strReturn As String

Set oHTTP = CreateObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")

oHTTP.open UCase$("POST"), strUrl, False, "", ""
oHTTP.setRequestHeader "Content-type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
oHTTP.send("")

pingSitemap = oHTTP.responseText
Set oHTTP = Nothing

End Function

Good luck with implementing this on your own website.

Custom 404 errorpages with Lotus Domino

Ferdi Verlaan — Tue, 2 Nov 2010 12:10:14 +0200
Although we try to prevent it, it is always possible to have deleted or moved content within your website. In Apache you can easily create custom 404 pages. In Lotus Domino it is just as easy!

Create a new form within your website application (website.nsf) with the name and alias: "$$ReturnGeneralError".

Just place all your html code within this form to resemble your own website look & feel. We also place a custom google javascript to ensure users can search within our site for the missing content. Just place the following code in your html:

This widget automatically provides suggestions or alternatives for the missing content, based on the Google index of your website. Visitors can now find the missing information more easily. From our own experiments it seems that the sitemap and closest match functionality wasn't available. This is probably because of the fact that our website isn't indexed completely by Google at the moment.

SEO optimization for Lotus Domino websites

Ferdi Verlaan — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:19:52 +0200

We have launched our new website a few months ago, and had training by Alain Sadon, an SEO Guru. After training my hands were itching to optimize our own website. Although the basic setup of our new website was good, there were a few optimalizations to be done. One of them was to implement a clean hierarchial path to the content.

Previous setup
I’ve already set up the website in the following manner: website.nsf/view/pagename
The view contained all the documents sorted by key and pagename was the actual key. It delivered a construction where a hierarchy was only two elements deep, for example:
website.nsf/products/coolproduct1
website.nsf/services/coolservice1

If I wanted to add specs to the cool product (ex: website.nsf/products/coolproduct1/specs), the hierarchy in Domino couldn't go deeper. At least, that was my initial assumption. After some reading and some testing I’ve come up with another construction.

New setup
In the website form I already had a field ‘key’, which contains a userfriendly alias for the document, for example ‘coolproduct1’. I’ve also setup a button where the user can select which parent the current document has. After selecting the parent, a field parentunid is filled with a unique id. After that I’ve created a computed field called ‘urlkey_seo’ which contains the following formula:

punid := parentunid;
pkey := "";

@While(punid != "";
pkey := "/" + @GetDocField(punid;"key") + pkey;
punid := @GetDocField(punid;"parentunid")
);

@LowerCase(pkey + "/" + key)

In essence, the formula loops through all parents and gets the field ‘key’ and separates the entries with a slash. Then I created the SEO template view ‘vw-tpl-SEO’ with the alias ’SEO’ which is sorted on the first column, with the value of the field ‘urlkey_seo’. Below a subset of the hierarchy of our corporate website.

To be able to open a document by key with a slash in it you have to add ‘?OpenDocument’ after the key: website.nsf/products/coolproduct1/specs?OpenDocument where ‘products/coolproduct1/specs’ is the key. But this isn’t the SEO way to go. We need to remove the '?OpenDocument ' and remove the .nsf in the path. For that issue we have the Domino subsitution rules on the server.

Substitution rules
Launch your Domino Administrator, go to the tab ‘Configuration’, in the tree select ‘Web’ \ ‘Internet sites’. In the middle you will see the website documents created for your websites. There we make three rules to keep our entire website working (our website.nsf is located in the root, but could be used with deeper directory paths as well). Create a new website rule from within your website document with ‘Web site’ > ‘Create rule’.

First rule:
Type: Substitution
Incoming URL pattern: /website.nsf/*
Replacement pattern: /website.nsf/*

Second rule:
Type: Substitution
Incoming URL pattern: /*
Replacement pattern: /website.nsf/*

Third rule:
Type: Substitution
Incoming URL pattern: /*/*
Replacement pattern: /website.nsf/SEO/*/*?OpenDocument

The first rule is to ensure our old links, that we don’t get a lot of 404’s. The second rule is to redirect the homepage (/website.nsf), since the third rule will mess that up. The third rule is the most important, it will replace all incoming paths to the newly created SEO view and fills in the wildcards with our 'urlkey_seo' value. The need of the double /* is again for the homepage, Domino doesn’t see the difference for a / or a /* in the incoming url pattern, and you will get a exception error that /website.nsf/SEO/?OpenDocument is not valid.

Screenshot of our substitution rules:

Restart the http task on the server and our new hierarchy www.domain.com/products/coolproduct1/specs is working. You can go as deep as you want because of the wildcard(s).

Images
With the above rules in place a /$FILE/attachmentname.jpg will result in a error. Because of the substitution it will append ?OpenDocument, and will result in an error. Therefor setup a new website document (ex: images.domain.com) and link to that path for your images. It will also give you an small improvement on your ratings, since Google appreciates cookie-less domains for images.

To see the whole thing in action, take a look on our new corporate website (only Dutch at the moment) at www.aashq.nl.

Next step is to optimize the default IBM blog for use with the above principle. We will post a new entry when we got that fixed.

Interesting links
Other interesting websites for SEO optimalization for Lotus Domino websites:
Codestore: http://www.codestore.net/store.nsf/unid/BLOG-20100617-0347
Domino Guru: http://www.dominoguru.com/pages/08112010083541.html

Enable Eclipse plugin installation in Lotus Designer 8.5.2

Ferdi Verlaan — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:00:14 +0200
After reading the excellent article by Rishi Singapore how to Install Subclipse for Domino. In his post he talked about that to enable this feature you need to add following line in plugin_customization.ini file which is located at \Notes\framework\rcp path.

com.ibm.notes.branding/enable.update.ui=true

After doing that and restarting the Lotus Notes client + designer, still no options under File > Application > Install.

This behaviour has changed in 8.5.2, for Domino designer 8.5.2 you have a nice little option in the preferences:

Voila, Subsclipse can now be installed! SVN support in Lotus Domino Designer!

How to get a handle to the updated backend document without re-opening the ui document

Cor Eigenhuis — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:07:23 +0200
While working on a project for a customer we've encountered a strange behaviour when trying to get a handle to the backend version of an open document in de UI. Below is a small case example with our workaround.

Workflow:
An ui document (not in edit-mode) is updated by code run from an inview-edit code on a response document ("Grondstof") within the embedded view on the ui document (A). These response document are automatically created by action "B".

A. Remove response document and update the parent (current ui) document by removing the "Grondstof" number (unique number for the child) from an array.
B. Runs a script which adds on or more new "Grondstof" responses. The array on the parent document is used for making sure no double response documents are created (the array has some other uses too).

Problem:
When running the script for action "B", getting the backend document by using uidoc.Document is not satisfactory. The backend document did not receive the updates by the inviewedit. On the screenshot below you can clearly see a difference, even though all code is referring to the same document.

Solution:
So instead of getting the backend document by using uidoc.Document, try:
Set doc = unidview.GetDocumentByKey(Cstr(uidoc.Document.UniversalID))

Make sure that the view 'unidview' is sorted on the UNID of the document(s) (with @Text(@DocumentUniqueID)).
This will make sure that your document contains the correct data, and that a handle can be made.

Mimic multiple signature support with stationaries

Ferdi Verlaan — Tue, 2 Mar 2010 12:13:57 +0200
Normally we would advise against changing the default mail template. It demands additional focus and testing when upgrading the Domino server. In this case we went against our own advice, and made changes to a mail template so that multiple people can work within it. A team-box if you like.

Now there is an excellent teambox template available on openntf.org. But the design of that template is very oldschool, and the client wanted the new and improvement look of Lotus Notes 8.5. Altough we would like to contribute add upgrade the design of the openntf template, unfortunatly the time is not on our side at the moment. Therefor the client and AASHQ have decided to update the current 8.5.1 mailtemplate.

Multiple signatures
The client wanted to work with multiple people in the team-mailboxes, but would like to keep their own identity in the signatures. The client is custom to using stationaries and work from there, but when replying and forwarding a message this option couldn't be used. We have created an additional view in template called '(StationaryLU)'. This is a copy of the standard view '(Stationary)'. We only removed the first three columns, as you can see in the image. We did this for a more simple lookup in the following code, you can also adjust the lookup-code to mimic the first three columns.

The users are creating their stationaries (signatures) and save them with a name in the format 'HandtekeningFull Name'. The word 'Handtekening' is Dutch for 'Signature'. We made the 'lookup-name' as user-friendly as possible as you can see.

Then we altered the sub 'InsertSignature' in the script library 'CoreEmailClasses', to the code below:

Const msgTxt = "This file contains one or more contacts. In Notes double-click the " &_
"attachment to add to your Contacts. In other mail systems you may have to save the "&_
"file to your desktop and then import it into your Contacts."

Dim s As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim profileDoc As NotesDocument
Dim wksp As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim uiDoc As NotesUIDocument
Dim nam As Notesname
Dim view as NotesView
Dim stationarydoc as NotesDocument

Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
Set profileDoc = db.GetProfileDocument("CalendarProfile")
Set view = db.GetView("(StationeryLU)")
Set uiDoc = wksp.CurrentDocument
Set nam = New NotesName(s.UserName)
Set stationarydoc = view.GetDocumentByKey("Handtekening " & nam.Common,True)

If Not stationarydoc Is Nothing Then
Call uidoc.ImportItem(stationarydoc,"Body")
Else
If profileDoc.HasItem("Signature_Rich") Then
If uidoc.Document.HasItem("$VAttach") Then
Call uidoc.FieldSetText("body", msgTxt + Chr(10) + Chr(10))
End If

Call uiDoc.ImportItem(profileDoc, "Signature_Rich")
End If
End If

You can find the code within a script variable, which will be 'Executed' later on in the code.

The code is a minimal adjustment to the original, and we only check the stationaryLU view for an entry with the name based upon the username. If this document is found we use the NotesUIDocument.ImportItem method to succesfully imported the Richtext Item. You can also update the (InsertSignature) agent with the above code.

As you can see, if no stationary document has been found, the default signature is used (when available). A simple adjustment with great impact for our client's users.

doc.Send versus doc.CopyToDatabase(serverOutbox) method

Ferdi Verlaan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:40:23 +0200
Normally documents are mailed by 'doc.Send' class and method.
You can also use the doc.CopyToDatabase method. This method is very handy for scheduled or signed mail agents. In this way you always can alter the from and principal field. With the doc.Send method most of the time the current user will be replacing these values. With the mail.box method the principal and from fields remain the same.

This method works when the field note.Recipients is set to value X. Where "note" is the document to send and "X" is the e-mail address(es).

Dim serverOutbox As NotesDatabase
Set serverOutbox = New NotesDatabase( db.Server, "mail.box" )

'Build a document ...

'Copy this document to the server's outgoing mailbox.
Call note.Save( True, True, True )
Call note.CopyToDatabase(serverOutbox)

DocType per form in a database

Ferdi Verlaan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:51:29 +0200
As of Domino 7.0.2 there is a new field that allows you to set the doctype on a form basis. Just add a computed for display field called $$HTMLFrontMatter, with a doctype formula like:

"" + @NewLine
Before this field it was necessary to configure your whole Lotus Domino server to one of the following settings:

Set the DominoCompleteDoctype environment variable in notes.ini. It has 3 different values:
0 =
1 =
2 =

A value of zero is the default/old behavior, with all the problems that it creates.
For more information about doctypes, see the article written by Jeffrey Zeldman of A List Apart.

Refreshing an embedded view

Ferdi Verlaan — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:42:51 +0200
If you want an embedded view to refresh then please add the following code to a button, action or other component that triggers the refresh:

Call ws.ViewRefresh
Call uidoc.RefreshHideFormulas
Call ws.ViewRefresh

On the embedded view itselve, make sure there is a hide-when formula. If there isn't any, give the embedded view the formula: 1=0.

Because this is never true, the embedded view will never be hidden, but it will be refreshed due to the "RefreshHideFormulas" command on the ui document.