Dive in to ace

We use HTML templates in our project. Unfortunately there is no ability to good editing this templates in the IBM Notes client

I dig around a little and found a cool thing - ace - that help us a lot.
So, xPages, ace, jQuery  and few hours of work:

xPage: Optimize Uploaded Image

I had a task to upload images in xPage. The next one is to optimize image lossless. User upload the image in to the Domino media library and the image optimizing on the fly.

Unfortunately there is no good Java solution for lossless optimization of images. There are set of solution to use third party command line programs and run it from java. The problem is that you need to install this program on the server, many of them supports only one OS, so if you have Domino server on the windows and then would move to the Linux (or vice verse) you got a problem.

I decide to use online optimizer. It looks like there is no good paid online services with a good API. So I start from the free one. It is well known Yahoo! Smush.it.

Smush.it has no API, but there is a guy who create stand alone java API for Smush.it service. He did it in the way of command line tool, but it could be used as API in your application.

I like it! The only one problem is that program out process information (log) directly in to the System.out. I need some information to be printed in to my log.nsf and some information to be returned to the user. So I add ability to put StringBuilder object in to the Smush.it API.  

Code example:

//log and statistic contains information 
//about process and compression result 
// 
//file - file to optimize, 
//generally opt rewrite file, but not in all cases. 
//Look "Important" section 
// 
//opt - optimized file

StringBuilder log = new StringBuilder();
StringBuilder statistic = new StringBuilder();

SmushIt smushIt = new SmushIt();
smushIt.setVerbose(log);
smushIt.setVerboseStatistic(statistic);     
smushIt.addFile(file.getCanonicalPath());
List<smushitresultvo> smushItResultVos = smushIt.smush();

ImageDownloader imageDownloader = 
 new ImageDownloader(file.getParent());
imageDownloader.setVerbose(log);

File opt = imageDownloader.download(smushItResultVos.get(0));      

StringBuilder log variable after running code:

Smushing files:

C:\Windows\Temp\notesE3A053\xspupload\0001.jpg

Adding file:C:\Windows\Temp\notesE3A053\xspupload\0001.jpg
{"src":"0b2c68eb%2F0001.jpg","src_size":40895,
"dest":"http:\/\/ysmushit.zenfs.com\
/results\/0b2c68eb%2Fsmush%2F0001.jpg",
"dest_size":38749,
"percent":"5.25","id":""}

Downloaded smushed image - 
http://ysmushit.zenfs.com/results/0b2c68eb%2Fsmush%2F0001.jpg
Saved image - C:\Windows\TEMP\notesE3A053\xspupload\0001.jpg

StringBuilder statistic variable after running code:

Source Image:0001.jpg
Source image size:40895
Smushed image size:38749
Percentage saving:5.25

Projects on github:
https://github.com/andriykuba/smushit
https://github.com/abhirama/smushit

Custom File Upload in the xPage. Java. Backend.

There are a lot of articles about custom file upload with xPages. Most of them are about JavaScript. They use Java classes, so convert that code in to the Java is not problematic.

It's very easy to do in backend java code within xPages. The only one miss is that we could not write to the file attachment directly from the request. We still need to use a file. Thanks to xPage - it handle server temp files himself.

The code:

public void process() throws Exception {
 HttpServletRequest request = getRequest();
 
 Document document =
  getEs().createDocument().getDocument();
 document.replaceItemValue("Form", "picture");

 Map parameters = request.getParameterMap();
 UploadedFile uploadedFile=
  (UploadedFile) parameters.get("upload");
 document.replaceItemValue(
  "FileName",
  uploadedFile.getClientFileName());
 
 File tmpFile = uploadedFile.getServerFile();
 File fileToUpload = new File(
   tmpFile.getParentFile().getAbsolutePath().
   concat(java.io.File.separator).
   concat(uploadedFile.getClientFileName())); 
 
 boolean success = tmpFile.renameTo(fileToUpload); 
 addAttachment(document, success?fileToUpload:tmpFile);
 fileToUpload.renameTo(tmpFile);
 
 document.save(true, true);
}

private void addAttachment(Document document, File file)
 throws Exception{
 RichTextItem item = document.createRichTextItem("Body");
 item.embedObject(
  EmbeddedObject.EMBED_ATTACHMENT,
  "", 
  file.getCanonicalPath(), null);   
}

Look http://lotusandjava.blogspot.com/2012/09/accessing-xpages-global-objects-in-java.html to find how to get request

xPage java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError

Suddenly got "java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError" error on my xPage for the class from "Java" design area. The day before it works without problems.

Project clean, rebuild does not help.  Server restart does not help. I read that Recompile code when opening in designer (xPages) solution helps for someone, unfortunately not for me.

The only one solution helps is to rename class that was not found. I am lucky to have only one such class and I am afraid to get this error again for all of them.


... maybe I will try to move code to the WEB-INF/src ...

My Client version is "20120703.0900-T00099SHF-FP2 (Release 8.5.3FP2 SHF99) "

xPage in DXL

Domino export xPage's (java area, libs, xPages actually) in to DXL as base64 with some pre header.  This does not allow to change DXL and import it back. More of then, extracting real base64 become hard task because there is no any information about that "pre-header" in DXL.

I found similar question on the stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9929325/encoding-scheme-for-ssjs-library-when-exported-via-dxl

How to print any data in XPage output

I was looking for a solution for output clean data in xPage without any tags.

Nice solution is present in the first comment to this post. In the case you need few xPage with output special data, better to create special base class and then just extend it.

More under cut.

Accessing XPages global objects in Java (extended)

There is nice post "Accessing XPages global objects in Java". There is a little more information about returned objects.

It's a good idea to create some base class to extend it for all classes that need access to global xPage objects.

So I take variables from that articles and add Request and Response objects also.

Look more for the source.

How to use Velocity in xPages

We are using velocity in our project for build some HTML fro some templates.

There was a problem with using it in the Java libraries. Look at this post to find problem description and solution.

Now we want to use velocity in the xPage context. There is also a little trouble:

at java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPermission(SecurityManager.java:544)
at java.lang.Thread.getContextClassLoader(Thread.java:456)
at org.apache.velocity.util.ClassUtils.getClass(ClassUtils.java:68)

This problem could be resolved  by adding next string in to the java.policy:

permission java.lang.RuntimePermission "getClassLoader";

We could not edit java.policy unfortunately. So we resolve it in the next way.

1. Download velocity source

2. Find place of error (at org.apache.velocity.util.ClassUtils.getClass(ClassUtils.java:68)):
ClassLoader loader = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader();

3. Replace this string with the xPage classloader initialization:
ClassLoader cl = com.ibm.domino.xsp.module.nsf.NotesContext.getCurrent().getModule().getModuleClassLoader();

4. Add appropriate library for compile velocity source with this new class.  You will need
Domino\osgi\shared\eclipse\plugins\com.ibm.xsp.domino_8.5.3.20110915-2025\lwpd.xsp.domino.jar
or similar

5. Compile new velocity jar from modified source.

Well done! You could upload velocity jar in to the WebContent\WEB-INF\lib and use it in the xPage context.

xPage CKEdior: how to remove language direction attribute?

in-build CKEditor in xPage (Domino 8.5.3) always add dir attribute to the text container's tags, like P or H2.  

For example:
<p dir="ltr">test</p>

I could change direction "ltr" or "rtl" from the Rich Text Element settings or CKEditor custom config, but I could not remove this attribute at all.

If I use trivial CKEditor, the this attribute absent until I special set up contentsLangDirection property.

So It looks like xPage force this attribute to be set in any case.

Does some one know how to remove it from the in-build CKEditor in xPage ?

New subscription for Domino developers on StackOverflow

Feel free to engage in to xPages thread on the StackOverflow