Accidentally discovered Mirror Image of L (:P)

Do not expect any serious stuff from this article as expectations might lead to disappointments. Was casually working and happened to punch in a couple of keys by mistake and found a ridiculous character which I have never seen before in the Lotus script editor (Of course I had seen it in other platforms).

I cannot type in that symbol here as I did on the lotusscript editor, so as an alternative I will do the most brilliant thing of showing you a screen shot, rofl.

I guess its easy for you to see what I am speaking about in the image. I must say that I have found some thing different to decorate my multi line comments with :)

Also I tried an msgbox on that. Seems to work. Another discovery - mirror image of L, rofl

Now I can give more meaningful message boxes for my client ;P

Handling Variants - Becare full about the Type Name or Class Name of Variants refering to Array Objects

Variants now a days are proving more useful to me than before. I stick to the thought that I should not use variants unless its really necessary. One of the most effective advices that I received from developers against using variants is based on the fact that it takes 16bytes memory space for the object where is its less in case of objects for integer, string etc.

I often get the feel that with the current hardware capacities heightened to tera bytes, 16 bytes wont matter that much, if we recyle them properly.

I performed a small test today as my code kept failing and failing and there was not much for me to look for.

I first checked what type of values result in which type of variants. So I did the following in a test button

Eventually, I previewed the button on a client interface and did the MAGIC JOB of clicking it. And there comes my BELOVED BABY popups as to the left.

Now I understood that these are of types "INTEGER", "STRING" and "STRING()"

Is there any soul out there who agrees with me. If so, join the club and clean your eyes/specs and look at the god damn thing properly.

It is actually "STRING( )" and not "STRING()". This screwed me for over 30 minutes. Some time back due to a specific individual in my life, I became of fond of reading and understanding the "LAWS OF STUPIDITY". The fourth law stated that,

"Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be costly mistake."

Now my question is who is stupid - Me , the Variant or ***

Colors in Lotus Notes View Columns

I always wanted to document this, but often felt lazy about doing it. Thus this got delayed by almost 4 and half years. Can you believe that? I can. I know I am better at doing stuffs more worse than this.

This post is typically about how you give different colors to different columns in Notes Client. Actually there is no such thing. Hence as always we end up doing simple work arounds. Let me give you a visual sneak peak before you end up reading my entire post and feel bored

Thats looks color full doesn't it :). The trick behind these colored columns with custom backgrounds are using hidden columns with "Use value as colors" enabled with a column formula like

backgroundColor:textColor where each of these would assume a value between 000000 to ffffff or 0:0:0 to 255:255:255. Refer to following image for more details

If you take a closer look at the image, you will be able to see that I am referring to three small columns with no titles and the two important properties "Use value as color" and "Hide column" enabled.

Make a note of the way in which I had assigned the color values to the variables. They are not in quotes. I have assigned the numbers colon separated just as is. So these variables are typically arrays containing three color codes as its elements

Change native lotus notes database display format - view index on top and view in bottom

Every Lotus Notes Professional would be aware of the way lotus domino databases would be displayed on the notes client if no custom framet has been configured, It would be something like the following.

I just messed up the view names for personal reasons. So I think I make sense here. View index would be on the left margin and the view being displayed or selected will be displayed ont the right margin.

But did you ever know that we have an option to change that to the following silly format :)

Believe me I did not take two different screen shots and place them together. This is a screen shot as it is from the notes client. Yes view index is on top and the view being displayed or selected will be displayed in the bottom pane like a preview pane and yes you can have a separate preview pane for the view as well.

Its just that your display will be messed up and will be ackward. I sont recollect a scenario where this would be of advantage as far as lotus notes client applications are concerned. Atleast, I now know that I have such an option and can do it. May be I would use it to statle someone in the future hi hi :)

Yes I dream a lot :)

By the way, as far as I know you need to use the following @commands to get this done.

@Command([ViewBelowFolders])

and to get the display back to normal, you can use the following command

@Command([ViewBesideFolders])