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Making Domino Designer Tidier & Less Annoying

Yesterday was a good day for me. I learnt of couple of tips from you guys that will help me loads. I'll share them here.

Auto-Saving Java

Firstly a big thanks to Andrew Magerman who has saved me hours and hours of time (potentially) with the following tip, which solves an annoyance I blogged about 3 years ago and have been suffering with ever since -- if you save a Java class from within an Agent or Script Library you have to then save the Library/Agent too. But now you don't need to, with the following preference enabled:

image

With this turned on the Agent or Library gets saved at the same time you save a class from within it. I'm not going to dwell too much on the fact I've only just found out about this and how much effort it's costs me over the years.

A New Perspective

I've known about the concept of Perspectives in Eclipse for ages, but never paid them much attention in Domino Designer itself. I've always just stuck with what I was given.

Now, thanks to René Winkelmeyer I have a new better-suited perspective on my Domino databases. As you probably know, I'm not an XPages developer.

René let me in on the "Forms/Views" Perspective which is akin to a "Domino Classic" view and cuts out all the new fangled design elements not relevant to you.

To get to this Perspective go to the Window -> Open Perspective -> Other... menu and choose it from the dialog, as below:

image

What this does is hide things like XPages (and other bits) from the left hand navigator of database design elements.

Taking it one step further you can toggle elements on/off per perspective from with Designer's preferences, as below:

image

My Domino Designer Perspective now looks like what you see below and is a lot less cluttered and distracting.

image

What other Designer-based and/or Java-coding tips have you guys got hidden up your sleeves? Or maybe I need to spend half an hour looking around Designer preferences and acquainting myself with it a little better...

Comments

    • avatar
    • Rene
    • Tue 3 Apr 2012 04:55 AM

    Great tips.

    I cannot count the number of times I tested a changed Java-agent/class without saving the main agent.

    Take in mind the forms/views perspective is new in 8.5.3.

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 3 Apr 2012 05:31 AM

      Is the feature in the 3rd image above also new in 8.5.3? (the ability to toggle elements on/off per perspective in the preferences)

      Show the rest of this thread

  1. The perspectives are new to 8.5.3. Additionally you don't need to get through the whole "Other" thing - the new perspectives are directly available in "Window" => "Perspectives".

      • avatar
      • Jake Howlett
      • Tue 3 Apr 2012 06:57 AM

      On my machine the "Forms/Views" perspective is only visible directly in the Windows->Perspectives menu if it is the active perspective. If I change to another Perspective it disappears and I have to then use the Other... option.

      Hide the rest of this thread

      1. Well, I'm pretty sure that it should work out-of-the-box that way (can't verify as I'm running 8.5.4 currently).

        But hey, it's Eclipse. Go to "Window" => "Customize Perspective", select "Open Perspective" from the Submenus drop down and go for what you need/want.

          • avatar
          • Jake Howlett
          • Tue 3 Apr 2012 07:08 AM

          There's an 8.5.4!? ;-)

          1. Yes - for Design Partners… ;-)

        • avatar
        • Jyotiprakash
        • Tue 3 Apr 2012 09:41 AM

        @Rene is correct.

        Try Ctrl+F8 . You will find a dialog box to select other perspectives

    • avatar
    • David Jones
    • Tue 3 Apr 2012 09:23 AM

    Nathan has a good post about some tweaks to the Designer client but it looks like he's having some issues with the hosting server. Here's the link for whenever that gets fixed.

    http://ntf.gbs.com/nathan/escape.nsf/d6plinks/NTFN-8GP6RP

  2. a word of warning.

    I found a list of perspectives in the preferences (used the search box, its in General:Perspectives.) in which you can also set the default perspective.

    Great! I thought. And noticed al these duplicate perspectives with no icon. To wit: multiple instances of Calendar, Mail and ToDo.

    Then I made the mistake of cleaning them up. And killed my Notes client (hangs in startup sequence)

    DO NOT DO THIS. I am now reinstalling from scratch...

    1. I noticed this with 8.5.2 and recognized the symptom from my days of messing about with some of the "IBM only" design elements in ND7 (there are a few, seemingly innocuous but obviously different implementations of standard elements in the mail template tinker with can screw your install up royal).

      After noticing, I thought I'd better just download the 8.5.3 client. Wow, that experience took me back in time about 8 years. IBM's website is still horribly organized and byzantine. It's amazing to me that they can't get their act together and make a website that has a consistent, simple and easy to use interface. Sort of explains a lot about the current state of the designer client I suppose.

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Written by Jake Howlett on Tue 3 Apr 2012

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