I tried desperately to maintain references to Notes objects within a bean.

I always got a stupid error, either 500 or serialization error…

then I stumbled across this excellent article.

Solution Summary:
don’t use “view” for bean scope if you need to serialize notes objects! use session or request scope.

Stupid!!! really stupid!!!

but now I got my stuff working

Michael

Did you ever need to “catch” a key event? I did! Using the type-ahead feature i wanted to fill some fields depending on the selected value from the type-ahead field.

Now I used the “onBlur” event first. But that would require the user to move the focus away from the field with type-ahead.

I was looking for a solution where immediately after hitting <enter> the fields below would be filled.

Turns out this is pretty easy:

use two onKeyPress event handlers: one client-side, one server-side:

client-side:

if (thisEvent.keyCode==13) {
      return true;
}else{
      return false;
}

server-side:
call whatever functionality you need! in our case it’s a bean populating dependant fields


the client-side piece of code checks for <enter> and calls the server-side functionality only on <enter>

this time just a link to share with you guys out there.

A REALLY, did I make this clear? REALLY REALLY cool fancy way to make type aheads the way I need them:

http://www.timtripcony.com/blog.nsf/d6plinks/TTRY-7XD5P9

Did you ever use the Extension library names picker? Do you like it? I don’t!

Why? It requires the user to use his mouse and make too many clicks to get to what he wants.

I have a better way to achieve it and it can be adopted to any type-ahead you would like: in only 3 steps!!!

And the coolest thing is: you can actually “fine tune” it.

Just to give a clue:
We have a database regarding travels which requires the user to enter his flights, we have a huge list of airports worldwide. So the user has 3 options for type-ahead: 2 characters will search for all airports in the country with that ISO code, 3 characters will search for a specific airport by that identifier and if the user enters more characters a full text search is being conducted! Ain’t that cool?

Steps: (check out the color coding where each piece goes to)
1. Define the field, make sure the var attribute is the one used as parameter to the method call of your bean, make sure the Class name is the name you defined as bean name (see step 3)

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<xp:view xmlns:xp=”http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core”>
<xp:inputText id=”airport”>
<xp:typeAhead mode=”partial” minChars=”2″ var=”searchValue“
preventFiltering=”true”
valueList=”#{javascript:TypeAHeadBean.searchAirport(searchValue)}”
ignoreCase=”true”>
</xp:typeAhead>
</xp:inputText>
</xp:view>
2. Define the bean:
public class YourBean implements Serializable{

private static final long serialVersionUID = -4498155370434392583L; // this can be auto generated and is required for beans as they have to be serializable

public ArrayList<String> searchAirport(String searchValue){
try {
ArrayList<String> al = new ArrayList<String>();

Database db = (Database) DominoUtils.getCurrentDatabase();

                         // this is the part you may want to customize, ie with a creative view you might not need FTSearch (take a look at ($Users) in the names.nsf
View view = db.getView(“lupAirports”);
if( 2 == searchValue.length()){
view.FTSearch(“[AirportCountryCode]=”+searchValue, 0);
}else if(3 == searchValue.length()){
view.FTSearch(“[AirportCode]=”+searchValue, 0);
}else{
view.FTSearch(“*” + searchValue.toLowerCase() + “*”, 0);
}


Document doc = view.getFirstDocument();

while(null != doc ){
                                // the values you add here will be displayed in the type ahead
al.add(doc.getItemValueString(“AirportName”));

doc = view.getNextDocument(doc);
}
                        // maybe you wanna sort the result properly
Collections.sort(al);
return al;
} catch (Exception e) {
// TODO Auto-generated catch block
e.printStackTrace();
return null;
}
}

}

// maybe you wanna add some “recycling of Notes objects”…

3. Setup the bean:
Add the bean to the faces-config.xml
  <managed-bean>
    <managed-bean-name>TypeAHeadBean</managed-bean-name>
    <managed-bean-class>com.acme.YourBean</managed-bean-class>
    <managed-bean-scope>view</managed-bean-scope>
  </managed-bean>
If you open the Package Explorer view you will find the faces-config.xml here:

more than 3 characters type-ahead conducting a fulltext search

3 characters type-ahead which looks up the specific airport

2 characters type-ahead which looks for all airports in the country denoted by the 2 character ISO code

I hope one again you enjoyed my blog.. any comments are welcome, don’t hesitate starting a discussion about an interesting topic

this time just a reference I deem important:

Unhiding the hidden ‘hidden input’ control in XPages

kudos to Declan Sciolla-Lynch