I finally had some time to try new “experimental” feature that has been added to IBM Notes in 9.0.1 release. And it is the ability to automatically take repository containing so called on-disk project and build NSF out of it. Which is something you probably do daily, but you have to do it manually in Designer.
After couple of tweets about this matter Jonathan Roche from IBM offered me help in case I have any problems. I always have problems ;-) But this was easy… What was missing in slides from IBM Connect 2014 session AD209: Making Your Development Team More Productive with IBM Domino Designer is the need to add one notes.ini variable. Thanks a lot Jonathan! I wish all problems with IBM sofware are solved like this one.
To make it work you need:
- 9.0.1 Designer
- add
DESIGNER_AUTO_ENABLED=trueto notes.ini file - and then simply run
designer.exe -RPARAMS -console -vmargs -Dcom.ibm.designer.cmd="true,true,nameof.nsf,importandbuild,C:\pathto\.project,nameof.nsf"
from command line.
Provided you have on-disk project in C:\pathto\ after a while you’ll have a new database (in this case named nameof.nsf) in Notes data directory.
Why I’m writing about it? Imagine this: you can trigger NSF creation after each commit to repository, then run a set of tests to make sure application is not “broken” and see the results for each of these builds. All automatically, without any other action apart from the commit/push itself.
And as a bonus you can easily see who broke the build and proceed with spanking or whatever it is you do to a naughty developer.