By Brian Arnold
Last week we announced that we are now providing two new Analyzer Filter Packs in this blog post. We have packaged up a set of Upgrade Filters for Domino 10, and also another set for validating that your applications will work on the new IBM Domino Mobile Apps platform (aka HCL Nomad).
If you are unfamiliar with our Upgrade Filters offerings or even if you are, you’re probably wondering what the significance of these filters is, and how they work. In this blog post I hope to demystify these new Filter Packs and help you understand how they can save you significant amounts of time when you need to ensure that your existing Notes databases will operate in either of those two environments.
IBM Domino 10 Upgrade Filters
The latest version of IBM Domino V10 was released to the public in October 2018. With the new release came a new set of LotusScript classes, methods and properties for making HTTP Requests to web servers as well as a set of new Mobile Controls for use in XPages/Custom Controls so that you can rapidly create mobile web applications.
With every major release of IBM Notes and Domino we have created a set of Upgrade Filters to ensure that nothing in your existing code conflicts with any of the naming conventions in new features that have been added to the platform. When using these filters, you can quickly identify any conflicts that may occur in your Notes databases which could also cause your applications to fail unexpectedly after an upgrade.
IBM Domino Mobile Apps Filters
IBM announced the Open Beta for the upcoming IBM Domino Mobile Apps (IDMA) platform in October 2018, shortly after the release of IBM Domino V10. Although IDMA is still officially in beta (and there is no defined eGA other than “Available Soon”) there has been a large amount of interest in the industry to obtain and start using this new platform.
Because we believe in forward thinking, we spent significant time reviewing all LotusScript and @Formula calls to determine which work and, more importantly, which ones do not work when using IDMA.
Some points to consider when looking at your Notes databases are that some very significant areas of Domino development do not operate at all in the IDMA, such as:
Composite Apps do not work. You will need an alternative user interface for these types of applications.
Java code of any kind does not work. Apple does not allow any Java runtime environments on iOS devices.
XPages in Notes Client (XPiNC) apps do not work. IBM recommends ensuring XPages apps also work in a standard browser and offers access to your mobile users with this method.
Beyond the significant unsupported areas of Domino applications listed above, we also reviewed all LotusScript and @Formula calls. Our findings were quite interesting. In many cases what did not work was what you might expect. For example, @Formula & LotusScript calls that manipulate design elements (e.g. @Command([FormActions]) ), or any calls to invoke Domino Administrator functions (e.g. @Command([MailRequestCrossCert]) ) do not function. These two examples we expected when performing our investigations since the Domino Designer and Domino Administrator clients will not be made available within the IDMA environment.
However, others that we expected to work correctly did not (e.g. @Command([MailOpen]) ). Finding all of the LotusScript and @Formula calls that do not work would be like searching for the proverbial “needle in a haystack” if you were to review your code manually.
In total, we discovered 31 LotusScript and 145 @Formula calls that did not function or were not supported in the IDMA platform. If you were to search through your existing Notes databases, even if you had the list of what did not function, this would be a tedious and time-consuming process to say the least.
How to Use the Upgrade Filters
Using these Upgrade Filters is very simple. It does rely on you having a version of our Teamstudio Analyzer product. For some of the Filters to work you will also need the latest version of Analyzer (E33) which was released on March 11, 2019.
Once you have obtained the Filter Pack that you wish to use, you can follow these steps to scan your Notes databases for any incompatibility issues:
Open the Notes database you wish to scan.
Launch the Teamstudio Analyzer application.
Switch to the “Audit” tab.
Click on the “Enable Auditor” option and then select the Filters database that you wish to use by clicking “Choose Filter DB”.
Enter the Server (optional) and Path to write the Audit Report to.
Once this is complete, then press the “OK” button. Analyzer will first run a full analysis on the Notes database and then perform the Audit using the filters that you chose. Two Notes databases will be created; the Analysis Report and the Audit Report. The significance for having the two Notes databases is simple; we first run a full analysis of the Notes database to capture all of the design in documents and then perform the Audit on the Analysis Results. We do this since the Analysis would need to occur in order to run the Audit, so you benefit from receiving both sets of documents.
If and when the audit finds design elements that will cause problems based on the selected filters, there will be an audit document created. This audit document will outline exactly what was found and why it failed to pass the audit. It will also contain a document link to the design analysis document that is located in the analysis report database. This way you can review the design element prior to opening the Notes database and design element in Domino Designer.
Once the Analysis and Audit are completed you will initially be presented with the Analysis results. You will need to also open the Audit Report database to see if there were any design elements that did not pass the Audit. I have included an example of an Audit Report below:
And that’s it! The total time to analyze and audit the Notes database in my example was less than 5 minutes in total. If I were to attempt to search for the 31 LotusScript and 145 @Functions manually it would have taken hours. I hope you can see how using the new Filter Packs with the analysis audit functionality can drastically reduce the effort in ensuring your Notes databases are compliant with IBM Domino 10 and the IBM Domino Mobile Apps platform.
UPDATE: Since this post was written, we have now merged the Mobile Filter Pack into the Upgrade Filter Pack. To learn more about the Filter Packs, click below.