For those of you who really know me, you know that I absolutely LOVE xml and xslt. Almost all of my development includes taking xml data and transforming it into whatever my heart desires (or the customer's) using xslt.
Well, Domino has been teasing me since R5 with ?ReadViewEntries, ?ReadDesign, and ?ReadEntries to display Domino view data, view design, and outline data respectively in xml format. However, when are we ever going to see a ?SearchViewEntries so that searches are returned in xml format!!!!
At Lotusphere earlier this year, I talked to George Langlais of IBM/Lotus and he seems to like the idea but says that there would need to be a customer push to get it prioritized to be done. So how about it? Does anyone out there want this besides me?
I do, but I'd suggest finding a way to get a formal drive set up. Maybe on LDD in the Notes 6 forum, or maybe via blogs with a high-visibility source, like Bruce's.
Henry Newberry was also in the room where I was talking to George Langlais about this. He said he would bring this up in the business partner forum. I'll check with him to see if he has.
YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Most emphatically yes.
So what else should we push for? I'm thinking it would be good for all view optional arguments to work when using the &RestrictToCategory argument. More specifically the &StartKey, &ResortAscending and &ResortDescending arguments. This, to me, would make single category views really usefull. It would be like having a "mini-view".
...Now what high profile person should we sell this idea for so that we can start gathering support for this? Should it be a Bruce Elgort, or Rocky, or OpenNTF. Should I just make a post in the Notes.net forums? Or is that not "official" enough? Maybe we should get Ed Brill to back us on this....however, I don't think that he does this type of stuff. I wonder if we can sell the idea to Alan Lepofsky and see if he'll rattle some cages at IBM/Lotus.
I guess I'll start first with the Business Partner forum (which for some reason no one will contact me to get me setup even though I have filled out the online form at least twice in the past few weeks!)
Recently I experimented searching views to return xml but could not get around it. Thought may be I was wrong. I would be glad to lend my support and Yes, we want it.
Have a look at the R6 and R7 Beta forums. I made some XML requests long ago.
see: { Link }
And YES ?SearchViewEntries would be cool
It would be nice, along with some additional exposed functionality within ?ReadViewEntries.
Some sort of page indication passed back would be extremely helpful for navigation. E.g.:
...?ReadViewEntries&Start=1.1.20&Count=10
If you wanted to grab the *prior* 10 entries, well... you can't. You could try to make a guess (e.g. Start=1.1.10), but you don't have access to read 1.1.10-1.1.19 then you're stuck with the exact same result set.
If ?ReadViewEntries would return the base entry position using the &Count you passed, that would be a huge help. The HTTP server already calculates this for HTML-rendered views (for the "Previous" button), so the functionality is already there.
Additional paging information, such as how many entries in the view are visible to the user, would also be helpful but could possibly be a significant performance killer.
Wow, reading that again reveals just how exhausted I was when I originally posted it. I made some critical typos. I'll re-summarize:
If you wanted to grab the *prior* 10 entries, well... you can't reliably. You could try to make a guess (e.g. Start=1.1.10), but if you don't have access to read 1.1.10-1.1.19 then you're stuck with the exact same result set. So how far back do you need to go?
If ?ReadViewEntries would return the "prior page" entry position using the &Count increment you passed, that would be a huge help. The HTTP server already calculates this for HTML-rendered views (it gets glued to the "Previous" button), so the functionality is already there.
Hi Erik,
Great suggestion about *prior* entries. This would be very useful. I've finally jumped through all of the hoops to get registered on the partner forum. I'm going to try and post these suggestions there to see what the other partners think.
Jack
While you're at it, see if you can uncover what "&SkipNavigate" does - the Java applet calls this command, but it's not documented. There's another one, too, but the name escapes me for the moment.
Great Idea.