By Larry Barker
As you probably know, Teamstudio Export is our Lotus Notes archiving tool, and now it's more powerful than ever, making it the ultimate wrangler for your digital dinosaurs. With Export, archiving your Lotus Notes databases has never been easier. Our software transforms your old databases into easy-to-navigate, fully searchable HTML and PDF archives that users can operate using only a web browser. It retains the structure and layout of your original databases, from categorized views to the appearance of forms and rich text fields, ensuring your archived data is comprehensive and easy to access.
We are constantly improving Export and our latest update is no exception. Now, unless you're the kind of person who pores over software release notes for fun, and hey, no judgment here, you might have missed out on some of our most recent additions. In particular, we’ve added some features that allow you to take care of situations where Lotus Notes’ extreme level of configurability could cause problems.
As of Export version 4.5, you now have the ability to tailor the values returned by @UserName, @UserRoles and @Environment for each database.
You're no longer confined to default settings; you can now set these values to your specific needs on a per-database basis. This allows you to fine-tune your Export archives in more adaptable ways.
To access these new customization options, head to the Database Level Configuration tabs for both HTML and PDF Exports. All you need to do is right-click on the database you want to customize within the Export user interface, and you'll find the settings ready for your adjustments.
Accessing the Database Configuration via the right-click context menu.
In earlier versions of Export, some users encountered challenges when dealing with hide-when formulas that used @UserRoles and the less frequently used @UserName. Issues arose because these formulas require user-specific context, which wasn't available at the time of exporting to HTML or PDF. Consequently, the earlier versions of Export would return an empty list for @UserRoles, leading to less-than-ideal outputs in those scenarios. Now, you can specify the roles and names to be returned by @UserRoles and @UserName for each database. This allows for a more accurate representation of your data during the export process.
Configuration options available.
The @Environment setting introduces the capability to incorporate INI variables, catering primarily to those vintage Notes applications that prefer storing variables in the NOTES.INI rather than a profile document.
While we provide the flexibility to set these values, it's crucial to understand that they are not intrinsically tied to the Export tool itself. The onus still lies with the Notes Developer to identify the necessary values. This is particularly important for understanding any 'hide-when' logic that might be coded into a form.
Values stored within each archive’s ‘dbconfig.json’ settings file.
Importantly, these settings are retained in the 'config' folder within the PDF or HTML archive output, making them automatically available for future exports of the same database.
After configuring your desired settings, rest assured that there's no need to recreate the XML archive of your database all over again. Simply regenerate the PDF or HTML Export you've just configured, and you're good to go!
As we continually strive to enhance the user experience and capabilities of our Export product, you can expect more database-level configuration options to roll out in the future. So keep an eye on this space for future updates!