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My turn to talk XPages, good and bad ...
Category xpages
Unfortunately, until now, I have not been able to get deep into xpages like I have wanted to. And to be honest, some of the talk around the the virtual water cooler was telling me I was in for a little ride getting into it. Today I started my journey, helped along the way by others ahead of me like Declan and with very little help from the Lotus Documentation (is it just me that finds the help difficult to navigate from a "where do I start and where do I go" perspective)??
Unfortunately, until now, I have not been able to get deep into xpages like I have wanted to. And to be honest, some of the talk around the the virtual water cooler was telling me I was in for a little ride getting into it. Today I started my journey, helped along the way by others ahead of me like Declan and with very little help from the Lotus Documentation (is it just me that finds the help difficult to navigate from a "where do I start and where do I go" perspective)??
Anyway ... so far I like the environment, the concepts, etc ... I am totally with Tommy Valand on XPages hijacking the id-attribute. While I see and understand the point about repeat controls and unique element IDs, I think more often than not if I name an element, I do so because I want to specifically smack it up with some CSS, now I can't via ID, I have to create classes for everything. Which I guess isn't really all that big of a deal, I have to adapt, but it seems kludgy. I would think that they could know if it was in a repeat control or not, and only hijack it if it were, otherwise, leave it alone.
That aside, the rest of what I've encountered so far is really just feeling my way around the whole concept. I've manage to easily (enough) convert some simple HTML/CSS to xpages and custom controls that would have obviously been very painful to do pre-xpages. I still need to get deeper into it all, learning more about all the power of the different scopes, etc. I smell lots of lovely capabilities there that I used to have to store my own "session documents" to have similar capabilities before.
I guess I am also somewhat disappointed with the use of tables for layout when dragging and dropping field elements on to the xpage. I would have much rather this was done with divs, so I have more control of the actual layout of the form without having to hand code it all. Progress is being made though!!
Two other items that bug me are:
1. If you click into a control, for example a button, to change the label, you can type a line of text, and then press enter to add a new line and keep typing, when in reality, pressing enter feels like it should accept the new label and take you out of changing it. Also if you press escape there to cancel your edits, the escape event falls to the form and its as if you were pressing escape on the form to close it (also canceling your changes to the label), just again, "feels" klunky
2. Obviously xPages are not WYSIWYG, but there are some real problems in recognizing content height in floating elements etc ... For example in the code below, the red box overlaps the content in the green box, actually obscuring several fields, etc ... when rendered in the browser, that section in red (along with several others above it) is actually rendered at the bottom of the form, below the content it partially obscures ... while its not a show stopper, it definitely makes it very difficult to modify certain elements of xpages under certain conditions. The only way around it I could find that wasn't completely intrusive (like cutting and pasting out the code for the overlapping elements) was to use HTML comments <!-- --> around the XSP code that overlapped when I needed to edit the underlying elements. In a more complex layout, this would be so hugely cumbersome ...
I realize all of these are fairly minor considering the power that xpages brings to the table. But continuos improvement is still needed, We're really dealing with a 1.0 release of xpages, so I can give them some leeway ... for now.
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