In this workshop the student will get familiar with the
Lotus Notes View container and the
Lotus Symphony container. The student will walk through the creation of a composite application and demonstrate how data from a Lotus Notes view can be integrated with a Symphony Spreadsheet. The conceptual use case for this application is the data in each selection of the records in the Lotus Notes view is carried over into a table within the Symphony spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is then built to have charts automatically generated from those tables. Here is a screen shot of the end application running in Lotus Notes 8.5. You can download this full tutorial using the
Symphony document version of it attached to this page.
Steps to create application
Prerequisite is to have Lotus Notes 8.5 and the web delivery for the
generic containers (Symphony, Notes, etc). This is identified in Step 1.
Step 1 – Installing the client
Install Lotus Notes 8.5 and then install the Web Delivery which contains the Symphony and Lotus Notes containers.
Step 2 – Setting up the files we will use
a) Copy the attached spreadsheet to c:\ so the path is c:\sprs.ods.
b) Copy the attached database (ChartDemos.nsf) to your No tes data directory under a “demo” directory. So for example your full path should be something similar to c:\notes\data\demo\ChartDemos.nsf”.
Step 3 – Creating the composite app
a) Create a new composite application using the File menu in Lotus Notes.
b) Type in the name of the composite application in the next prompt
c) That will open the composite application in the Lotus Notes client. Now select the menu option “
Actions | Edit Application” to open the application in the Composite Application Editor (CAE).
Step 4 – Assembling the application
a) Under the CAE Pallette on the right of the CAE editor, drag the “Notes View Container” onto the empty canvas.
b) In the tree on the left, right click on the newly added component and select “Edit Component Properties”
c) In the advanced properties screen we will rename our component as “Problem Report Totals” under the Component Settings tab.
d) We will then click the “Browse” button to locate our newly copied
ChartDemos.nsf under the demos directory. We want this to be a view so we will select “View” as the kind of object and then select the SPRView as the view name.
e) Change the URL to also include &hidenavigator=true – this will hide the folders panel in the component.
f) Click OK and return to the Advanced Properties dialog and click OK there also. The view should now be on your CAE screen:
g) Now drag the Symphony Spreadsheet container onto the screen and make it appear to the right of th e Problem Reports view:
h) Right click on the newly added component in the left tree and select its “Edit Components Properties”. We are going to point this container to the sprs.ods file in the root c:/
i) Change the name of the component to “Problem Reports Charts” and select the file using the Browse button.
Step 5 – Defining the component configurations
a) We will define the Problem Report view components properties first. Type in the Name field in the toolbar tooling and then select the field “Name” from the helper drop down list. This binds the property “Name” with the underlying field on the note (Name). Once you select the “Name” field from the drop down list click the Add action icon (
) to create the new property.
b) Do the same for the “Closed”, “Opened”, and “Pending” properties
c) Now click the “Save and apply changes” button
d) Next, we will work with the chart component. The tooling works very similar to the Notes tooling. The primary difference is the “field” identification is done with a point and click model and the tool will provide the cell ranges for you.
Navigate to Sheet2 in the workbook. We will select rows A2 through A10 and declare that as the “Name” property. Make sure you select “receive” in the first drop down – this tells the configuration this component can receive these fields from other components. Make sure you click the “Add action” after each definition.
e) Do the same for the following properties – Opened, Pending, Closed
f) Now click the “Save and apply changes” button on the chart component
g) Lastly, we need to have this table update no matter what sheet has focus in the Symphony container. We will need to edit the Advanced properties one more time for the chart component and change the Type of Landmark to “Spreadsheet” and the first landmark to be “*”.
Step 6 – Wiring the components together
a) We will only be wiring from the Notes view to the Symphony view in this exercise. We will use the new wiring UI in the Notes 8.5 client. You will drag the wire icon from the left Notes view to the title bar area of the Symphony view.
b) The result should be a dialog similar to the following will appear
c) Now we simply match the output properties from the Problem Report Tools component with the input actions of the Property Report Charts component. Let’s start with the “Name” property:
d) Once the property and action fields are filled in simply click the “ Add Wire” button to add the new connection.
e) You will do this for each of the properties we defined (Opened, Closed, Pending)
f) You can check to see what wires have been created by expanding the lower arrow:
g) Your application should be fully functional at this point! Close the CAE and save the application to experience it in the runtime.