GetElementsBYClassName bug in IE

A while ago I was working with a checkBoxElement.click() type of function in which I had my client side javascript code identify the checkBoxElement through a HTMLNode.getElementsByClassName('myClassName') method.

This worked like charm with Chrome ( Chrome is the best :), unfortunately as expected this one had issues with the great Internet Explorer.

Eventually I had to scan through the web and with little effort I found the following nice function

function getElementsByClassName(node, classname) {

/* function obtained, modified and reused from

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7410949/javascript-document-getelementsbyclassname-compatibility-with-ie

*/

var objectCollection = [];

        var re = new RegExp('(^| )'+classname+'( |$)');

        var els = node.getElementsByTagName("*");

        for(var i=0,j=els.length; i<j; i++)

            if(re.test(els[i].className))objectCollection.push(els[i]);

            return objectCollection;

        }

This worked well across both Chrome and IE. I am relieved :)

Hope this helps :)

Function to bring focus to a html field element

function focusField(field) {
var myField;
if (typeof field==='string')
myField=document.getElementById(field);
else if (typeof field=='undefined')
return;
else myField=field;

window.setTimeout(function ()
    {
myField.focus();
myField.select();
}, 0);
}

Search issues in XPages #1 - Dont forget to Create FTIndex in replicas manually

I have been working with XPages searches for a long time. It has been a while since I have worked with XPages and I was almost happy to get my hands on it again. I had to create a search feature that would help my clients perform a decent search.

Since they were ok with performing an FTIndex on the application, XPage searches was a nice option that occured to me.

To my frustration, proving that I got a little rusty with XPages, it took me 4 hours to get this search feature complete. I was bombarded with errors and for some reason, my search was not working the way I expected it to work.

Following are the summary of the issues that took me time to identify and fix

#1. Enable "Display Xpage runtime error page" in the XPages tab in "Application Properties". Else you would end up debugging for a long time

#2. My XPage's view control lost its data source referance and was showing a 'red X' in the application navigator which I missed to notice oweing to large number of design elements.

#3. Check source code pane, now and then to find if there are any errors being displayed. It will exist there with out any warning and you would not notice it on the design pane of the XPage

#4. Enable FTIndex inorder to work with the native search feature available with XPages

#5. Be warned, in case of clustered server, were replicas of databases from multiple servers are used to render a webpage. Because, FTIndex dont ret replicated. They need to be enabled and updated across replicas separately.

My search worked like charm after I rediscovered all of these items again :(