I got some bad XPages news today… where I’m doing something that works today… that I feel I should be able to do.. it’s not really that fancy.. but learned that it’s very possible that what I’m doing might not work in the future.

Here’s the issue. If you look at this XPage from xpagescheatsheet.com:

You’ll see a list of contacts in a repeat control. Yes this is an UGLY page. But the inside of the repeat is being generated from a SSJS Object. Why? I wanted to seperate my data from the UI structure. I’ve included that code at the bottom of this post.

What’s a SSJS Object? We’ll I’m just a small town Notes Client Developer at heart. But there is a way to use SSJS similar to a LotusScript Custom Class. I like that. It’s “comfy”. So my SSJS Object can basically have properties and methods/functions.

I demonstrated this technique in my Introduction to XPages Video (Part 2). Skip to minute 42ish to see what I’m talking about.

Anyway – what I’ve learned today.. is that this type of object – which works totally fine in sessionScope today… does not work in viewScope. (I’ve not ever tried that actually). In addition I learned that it’s very possible that this technique will no longer work in sessionScope in the future.

Why? I don’t know. It has to do with “Serialization”. Honestly I don’t know what that means. viewScope is strict about this.. sessionScope “overlooks” this… for now.

The best solution is to “Suck it up, Learn Java and use Managed Beans”. And while I agree that is the best way to go, I feel a little bummed that I’m forced to go the Java path and that SSJS can’t handle something that LotusScript did so very well.

Anyway… this might not be a huge deal.. I don’t know.. Maybe I’m the only one really trying to do this. I am certainly not the best XPages/JavaScript dev in the land. Far from it actually. I just liked learning and working with SSJS in a similar way that I used LotusScript. It helped me with the transition.

I will say that I did reach out to someone from IBM, and very quickly got a nice response giving me details on this and even a potential workaround. I’ve not fully digested that information yet, but I very much appreciate the IBMers that took the time to get involved!

I’ll be playing with this stuff this weekend, but I think the moral is that XPages development, unfortunately, needs more Java skills then I originally thought, and more then I would have wanted.

Here is the code structure of the SSJS object:

var contactDoc = (function contactDoc(key) {

// Key really needs to be a string here. Convert it before it gets passed in.

//Pull data from External Datbase
// Here are the Database and View Names
var dbName = “FakeNames.nsf”;
var viewName = “ByName”;
// I assume that the database we’re looking up is in the SAME PATH as the current db
var path = database.getFilePath().split(database.getFileName())[0];
var fullDB = path + dbName
var lookupDB:NotesDatabase = session.getDatabase(database.getServer() , fullDB);
//var vLookup:NotesView = lookupDB.getView(viewName);

//print(“key=” + key);

var size = @Length(key)
//print(size);

if (size > 15)
{
//This is a Unid
var unid = key;
var contactDoc:NotesDocument = lookupDB.getDocumentByUNID(unid);
var contactKey = contactDoc.getItemValueString(“number”);

var temp = 1
var status = true
}
else if (size>1 && size <= 15)

{
// Key must be an @Unique or ProjectKey
var lookup:NotesView = lookupDB.getView(“ByNumber”);
// print(lookup.getSelectionFormula());
var contactDoc:NotesDocument = lookup.getDocumentByKey(key, true);
var unid = contactDoc.getUniversalID();
var contactKey = contactDoc.getItemValueString(“number”);
//print(key);
var status = true
var temp = 2
}
else
{
var status = false
var contactKey = “”
var temp = 3
}

return {
getUNID: function() {
return unid;
},
getKey: function() {
return contactKey;
},
getFirstName: function() {
return contactDoc.getItemValueString(“firstname”);
},
getLastName: function() {
return contactDoc.getItemValueString(“lastname”);
},
getFullName: function() {
return this.getFirstName() + ” ” + this.getLastName();
}

}
});

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