These workshop exercises are designed as an introduction to Lotus Domino's xPages functionality. To give you a complete learning experience, you will build a demo application in the course of completing the exercises. The result of a previous exercise will be needed as input for following exercises.
Some of the exercises do not directly contribute to the sample application, since they are designed to highlight and explore functionality and capabilities of xPages not needed in the sample application in all variations. These exercises are typically followed by an exercise that implements a subset of the function in the sample application.
Note: To be able to complete the exercises you will need to consult the documentation for Lotus Domino development since information given in the documentation is not duplicated in the exercises.
Exercise structure
All exercises are structured in the following way to ensure your learning success:
What will you learn
Description of the functionality or concept the exercise will explore.
Task description
High level description of the desired function or behavior
Detailed steps
Step by step instruction what to do. Where appropriate screen shots or code snippets will be provided.
The result
Description how the outcome looks like or what ability you have gained completing this exercise, typically accompanied with a screen shot.
Things to explore
This describes variations or extensions of the current learning step. In a classroom setting this allows the fast learners to deepen their understanding. It also serves as suggestion for after training exercises. The suggested activities are not relevant for completing the training.
Further readings
Links and pointers to documentation, articles, wiki or blog entries related to the learning topic. Also the room for your own notes about the topic.
Resources
Code snippets, images, stylesheets, and nsfs
Presentation
The following presentation introduces you to XPages and IBM Lotus Domino Designer 8.5 and then provides a walk-through of the XPages tutorial, including tips on how to do the exercises below.
Presentation
List of Exercises
The following exercises form the xPages workshop. The list contains the learning experience for all exercises.
Exercise 1
You will become familiar with the basic working of the xPages editor and the components palette.
Exercise 2
You will become familiar with conditional display of information in xPages. You will learn the difference between full and partial refresh.
Exercise 3
You will build the foundation for our sample application and learn about application structure that allows styling your application easily.
Exercise 4
You will learn how to create a custom control that has a customizable content area. You will use the control in the sample application
Exercise 5
You will learn how to display notes documents in xPages using form properties and simple data binding.
Exercise 6
You will learn how page flow works in xPages and how to code actions behind action buttons.
Exercise 7
You will learn how to provide data to the different controls on the xPage and how to enable type-ahead functionality in xPages.
Exercise 8
You will learn how to show data from a Notes view in xPages.
Exercise 9
You will learn how to use the xPages Scope contexts with advanced data binding and how to propagate data from one form to another. Further you will learn how to show a subset of view data only.
Exercise 10
You will add data validation to the forms in the sample application.
Exercise 11
You will explore the different modes of data validation and use server side validation and the error display components. You will become familiar with xPages' error handling concepts and capabilities.
Exercise 12
You will understand how to use server and client side JavaScript libraries for validation (or other purposes).
Exercise 13
You will use a custom validator using a regular expression and another one using your own JavaScript code.
Exercise 14
You will learn how to complete the tab navigation and how to communicate state information.
Exercise 15
You will learn how to use the Java perspective to add a Page Icon to your page.
Exercise 16
You will prepare additional form and view elements to complete the application
Exercise 17
You will learn how to use the repeat control. It will allow you you have free form repeating elements.
Exercise 18
You will learn about Themes and visual customization
Exercise 19
You will learn how to use a combination of client and server side JavaScript
Exercise 20
You will learn how to call a Notes agent from xPages and hand over the document for processing.
Exercise 21
You will learn how to use existing @Formula in your documents
Exercise 22
You will learn how to convert an existing Notes view into an xPage automatically.
Exercise 23
You will learn how to use a collection of multi-value fields in a Notes document as data source for a table in xPages.
Exercise 24
You will learn how to use embedded HTML and JavaScript including Dojo.
Exercise 25
You will localize an xPage to support more than one language.
Exercise 26
You will learn how to call a Java function in xPages.
Further information
This workshop is based on ideas of Philippe Riand, Maureen Leland, Tony McGuckin and Eamon Muldoon. Exercises created by Stephan Wissel and Tim Clark. The exercise structure has been contributed by Stephan Wissel.
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks