Thursday, January 20, 2011

Testing takes longer than writing the application in XPages

Granted the Girl Scout cookie application for Lotusphere 2011, I wrote as an XPages app is far from anything most of the developers would write.
But it got the job done.

What was interesting was testing took longer than coding.
Agents, without access they are just text and graphic buttons that do nothing, and in some cases cause replication/save conflicts.
With proper access, they run and work properly.

I learned XPages needs a data source, which to me is rather unintuitive.
Why do I need to create a non-XPages form to make the XPages form work properly?
Why does submit not ask me where or who to submit it to but you have to go and create it all from scratch?
No wizards? (Yes I am being lazy, but also acting like a new developer)
Why can one not use a .PNG file as an image? I know how to do it, I added it as a resour, but really would it be so hard for you to add one more file type to that drop down?


Undoubtedly someone will point me to XPages 101 that shows how to do this easier, simpler and cleaner.
But I am not a developer and the same skills that 18(damn, really?!) years ago I hacked together an IT outage database I can still hack away with today makes me very happy.


So what did I learn this time? Not much as I used previous work to minimize the length of time involved.
Could it be better, sure but I wasn't looking to hook it into Paypal or anything. Way too much overhead for what I thought would be a few boxes.

Turns out I was wrong, it is way more than a few boxes. Thank you all so much and keep the orders coming.

3 comments:

  1. most of the time testing takes longer than coding. Sadly, companies typically don't plan it that way.

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  2. Regarding the need for a form: Keep in mind that one of the key concepts of XPages is to separate the layout from the data.

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  3. @Mike I get that but it would be nice if the layout could also be the data but yeah I know, its a db thing.

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