Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Windows explore in your notes forms or even the notes 8 sidebar?

Chris Toohey touched on this a while back. I have been doing this for years and helped him a bit.

Since release 6 I have used this technique extensively to handle file attachments.

The concept is embedding a windows explore object in a form and passing it parameters.

First issue I encountered was anytime I tried to right click on a file or folder I got an error stating running a script on this maybe unsafe. So a little registry code to add all my mapped and local drives to the trusted sites list fixed this.

Next I wanted to lock down the target network share I was storing the files on.
Some win32api code provided a way for me to pass credentials to map and log into the share on form open, and disconnect it on form close. The users never knew where the files were.

I have attached a db here with a form that has the embedded object and the code to add logical and mapped drives.

If you are in Notes 8.x you can make a sidebar widget from the existing document in the db.

Contact me if you need help with this

2 comments:

  1. Awesome stuff John!

    Devin Olsen ran with this approach and put together a slick little application that used the embedded browser... I think there's a download around here somewhere.

    I wonder if this isn't a good candidate for an OpenNTF project...

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  2. Chris, good idea open NTF Maybe the three of us should "Collaborate" on it :-)

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