martin jinoch

Twitter conversation about version control has brought me to the debate about .git folder appearing in NSF file and how to avoid having it there. I remember seeing one NSF file with .git folder in it a while ago and I’ve deleted it from NSF without any consequences. NSF is still fine, git repository it is connected to as well. But Cameron Gregor (and probably Sean Cull too) had different experience.

I am writing this at Brussels airport on Sunday afternoon waiting for evening flight back to Prague. Since Wednesday when we came to Leuven to attend BLUG 2013, weather got really bad and although we have March 24 whole Brussels and Antwerpen (and I am sure more other places) are covered by snow and it is freezing out there. Yet even this really unpleasant ending could not spoil great feeling I have about this year’s BLUG.

Another stupid mistake has taken a lot of my time last week. I developed a small library to provide function(s) to move attachments from rich text fields to separate db (nsf or some other). This function was supposed to be part of bigger process, so saving of document being processed was meant to happen in other code. That is why I had not tested what doc.save() would do. My tests were just checking destination db for created records containing moved files.

I was developing very simple XPages component recently and because it was basically loop through a list of field names (and the task was to show something for each of them) I have used repeat control and inside of it there was custom control with properties such as fieldName (String), label (String), isRequired (boolean) and so on. In the custom control I was binding fileDownload and fileUpload controls (based on read/edit mode) to document field via EL as "document1[compositeData.

Last two blog posts were about using Git and git-flow with DDE. I use command line as main working interface when interacting with Git repositories. I am used to it, I am more productive this way. But If you’re not used to use CLI, there is GitHub for Windows available for you. Go try it! And if Git doesn’t sound familiar to you, try it in your browser, without the need to install anything.

Today’s talk about setting up a development workflow for a new project reminded me of my promise to write the second part of this blog post. So here we go: Installing Gitflow Just read and follow the instructions in gitflow wiki. You may also want to setup very handy command completion, instructions are here. Start using it In the folder with your on-disk project (in our case it is C:\Program Files\ibm\lotus\notes\data\workspace\git_test) simply run the command git flow init and answer the questions (simply accepting the defaults is just fine).

This is a first part of posts on version control with Git for Notes developers. I’m writing it as an addendum to my BLUG 2012 session “Version control for Notes developers”. Version control for Domino Designer projects - using command line Git (aka the HARDCORE way) Designer 8.5.3 has built-in capability to link NSF/NTF files with so called on-disk projects that can be used by version control systems. That alone is not enough to successfully use version control systems directly from Designer.

Day 2: Friday Waking up in the morning is not my hobby (“good morning” is an oxymoron for me). And after all those beers (Belgian beers are usually stronger than Czech ones, but we are used to drink 0,5l as “one beer”) this morning was especially hard. But we made it to the Crown Plaza Hotel just in time to attend “How XPages became mobile” with Earmon Muldoon and Paul Withers.

BLUG has been really good event this year. Again! Theo is a great host, doesn’t matter if you’re speaker or attendee, he treats you well. Extremely well. All that chocolate in a speakers room! I was full of energy and good mood until late night hours even after the whole busy day at a conference. Splendid! Day 0: Wednesday Being a speaker for the first time on LUG event (except Czech one) and presenting in English for the first time ever was kind of difficult for me.

Here is the slide deck for my BLUG session on version control