New Release of Extension Library, Including MapPicker and CollectionPicker

This week IBM released the twelfth 9.0.1 release of the Extension Library. It’s great to see the inclusion of mapValuePicker and collectionValuePicker tags. That has proved the completion of a journey almost two years in the making, since I first blogged a tutorial series on doing this, back in May 2013. At the time they were just Java classes used to compute the value of the dataProvider. They were then submitted onto XSnippets, again as Java classes to compute the dataProvider. With some help from Nathan T. Freeman to set up a skeleton class, I was then able to convert them into actual dataProviders in the OpenNTF Domino API. Finally, late last year, I offered them as a pull request to the core Extension Library.

One particular element of the pickers that I’ve used quite heavily is the searchType, to do more than just jump to the first element that matches the search criteria.

What’s even better to see from the release notes is that what I offered has been extended further, with the ability to do custom filtering. So you can convert what’s typed into the search box for what’s used in the search.

This really shows the benefits of how a custom piece of code can move to being a community component, to being part of the core. It also highlights IBM and the community working together and I look forward to more goodness in the future.