Command Line Building of NSFs

To facilitate the building of NSF/NTF files from source code repositories, Domino Designer has provided a command line build system.
It is not a necessity to import source repositories into the Designer application to build NSF/NTF files.
This is aimed at supporting team based development using the Domino Designer.

Setup

To enable this functionality, one line needs to be added to the notes.ini file
DESIGNER_AUTO_ENABLED=true

Running

The command line build can be run in two different ways

• Single Command
• Command File

 

Single Command

The single command has the format:

The single command is made up of a number of comma separated components, and is contained within double quotes.

The values for each of the components are:

• clean: true/false
• exit: true/false
• file name: String value containing the name of the NSF/NTF to be created. If no file extension if included then a type of NSF will be created.
• job name: the job to be run
• file path: the path to the .project file of the repository to be built

 

The Headless Designer supports a number of jobs:

 

 

Example:

 

 

Console

The output of the build can be viewed in a console by specifying the console as a program argument
designer -RPARAMS -console -vmargs -Dcom.ibm.designer.cmd=single command

 

Logging

The command line build also writes to its own log files

• HEADLESS0.log
• HEADLESSJOB0.log

These files are stored in the root Notes directory

 

Command File

For multiple commands, it is possible to pass a file path as a Java property to the command line build.

This file will contain one command per line, and a sample command file would be as follows:

 

Notes

Although this is a command line build system, the Designer is launched and immediately minimised. However, no user interaction is needed with the GUI. However, due care needs to be taken as with the existance of the GUI, there is potential for issues where some unexpected state could display a dialog, etc.

General features

• Import an on-disk-project and create an NSF
• Remove any on-disk or NSF projects imported into the Designer since the beginning of a command-line session
• Ability to restart Designer at any point during the command processing and resume where it left off.
• [possible IBM internal feature] expose Eclipse Update Manager command line syntax for installing/updating update sites, etc.
• [possible IBM internal feature?] extension points to allow adding commands

 

 

Update Manager Commands

These were added to allow some ability to update the Extension Library plugins using the command-line syntax.

com.ibm.designer.domino.tools.userlessbuild.jobs.UpdateManagerJob command

where "command" is a standard Eclipse Update Manager command.
See: http://help.eclipse.org/indigo/index.jsp?topic=%2Forg.eclipse.platform.doc.isv%2Freference%2Fmisc%2Fupdate_standalone.html


Also, if the [internal] Update Manager command interfaces are being used, it will probably be necessary to disable the Notes provisioning security, in order to allow "dropping" plugins into Designer.

• command install -from jar:file:file_url -to file:/workspace_applications -featureId featureId -version version
• command enable -to file:/workspace_applications -featureId featureId -version version
• command disable -to file:/workspace_applications -featureId featureId -version version
• command uninstall -to file:/workspace_applications -featureId featureId -version version

An example command file, using a few Update Manager commands: