Local Composite Applications (.ca files)

The purpose of this article is to inform readers of the local composite application support that is now part of Lotus Expeditor and Lotus Notes.
 
Starting with the 6.2 release of Lotus Expeditor and the 8.0.2 release of Lotus Notes there is a new mechanism available for creating composite applications. We call these local composite applications.
A portal server is no longer required to create, use or edit composite applications in Expeditor. For somebody that wants to create a new composite application it is now just a matter of selecting a menu item that displays a dialog and then selecting a name and a location for your application. An XML file gets created with a .ca extension and the application is opened. The .ca extension is now a file extension that is recognized by the operating system as a composite application file type. If a .ca file exists on your system you can click
on it an expect the composite application to open in Expeditor or Notes.

Two additional menu items have been added to the UI to give users access to the local functionality.

File -> Application -> New Composite Application...

and

File -> Open -> Composite Application...

When New Composite Application is selected the user will be presented with a dialog that allows them to select a directory and a file name for their application.



If a user wants to open a local composite application they can use the Composite Application function under the open menu. This will display a dialog that allows a user to enter a file name or navigate to a .ca file.
A URL can be entered into this dialog so you can open files on an http server or a remote share. As we said, the term local is used more to make it clear a portal server is not needed than to mean the .ca files have to reside on your local machine.




As you can see, these dialogs are very simplistic and creating and opening local composite applications is very simple as well. the editing and using of these applications is the same as any other composite application you have come to know. Because
of this we will just go over a very short example of creating and editing a local composite application.


The firs thing that we will do once Expeditor is running is open the New Composite Application dialog. The dialog itself is seen above. Accessing this dialog is shown in the screen shot below.



We named our application 'Demo Local App' in the dialog and pressed OK. We are now presented with a blank composite application open in Expeditor



From here we can selected the Actions -> Edit Application menu item to open our application for editing inside of the composite application editor (CAE).



Adding components to the application in CAE is just as it is for any composite application. We will create a number of pages and add a Managed Browser and a different navigator to each page



Once we are finished editing the application we save and close and the application opens in Expeditor.



All of the data defining this application is written to the .ca file that we created from the New Composite Application dialog. As we said, this is just a ca xml file that has a .ca extension and now the .ca file extension is
recognized by the operating system.

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