Lotus Guru

Category Lotus Notes Notes Client Show-n-Tell Thursday

Although I'd much rather toss a few of my own Lotusphere wrap-up thoughts into the Blogosphere, I figure I'd at least get this one out now while it's fresh in my mind...pretend it's Thursday

My client is going through an upgrade to Notes 7, and one of the great new features is of course the ability to "Save Window State" such that when you restart Notes you see the same window tabs as when you shut down. A fine feature that we decided to turn on by default, but a few users had a problem with this. Specifically, the problem users were those who had, prior to the upgrade, figured out how to add windows to their "Startup" bookmark folder (found under "More Bookmarks"), allowing for instance your Inbox and Calendar to both launch automatically when you started Notes.

The "problem" was that under certain circumstances you might see duplicate window tabs on Notes startup, one for the "saved window state" and the same one again from the"startup". My solution was to give users two buttons so they could pick between the old or new approaches:

- BUTTON 1: Disable the save window state features and continue using the "Startup" option.
- BUTTON 2: Clear out the startup folder in order to rely solely on the newer "Save Window State" approach.

In both cases, the code involved affects the Notes.ini file and the Bookmarks database (bookmark.nsf). While the code isn't particularly complicated, it did take a fair bit of poking around in the design of the bookmarks database to understand what changes were required. Unfortunately the innards of the bookmarks database are not terribly well documented, so I thought I'd share my code here in case anyone found it useful.

Here's the code for BUTTON 1:

Sub Click(Source As Button)
    Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
    Dim session As New NotesSession 
    Dim bookmarkdb As NotesDatabase 
    Dim outline As NotesOutline 
    Dim entry As NotesOutlineEntry 
    Dim childentry As NotesOutlineEntry
    Dim folder As NotesView
    Dim vec As NotesViewEntryCollection
    
    Set bookmarkdb = Session.GetDatabase("", "bookmark.nsf") 
    
    Set outline = bookmarkdb.GetOutline("UserBookmarkOrder") 
    
    Set entry = outline.GetFirst() 
    
    'This will find and delete the bookmark folder containing the links for the Last State, if they exist
    Do While Not entry Is Nothing 
        If entry.Label = "Last State" Then 
            Do While entry.HasChildren
                Set childentry = outline.GetNext(entry)
                Call outline.RemoveEntry(childentry)
            Loop
            Call outline.save()
            Goto ExitLoop
        Else 
            Set entry = outline.GetNext(entry)
        End If 
    Loop 
    
ExitLoop:
    
    'Now we need to remove the "link" documents from the Last State folder
    Set folder = bookmarkdb.GetView("$LastState")
    Set vec = folder.AllEntries
    Call vec.RemoveAll(True)
    
    'This will disable the "Save Window State on Exit" user preference
    Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "SaveStateOnExit", "0", True)
    Messagebox "You will need to restart your Notes client for the settings to take effect", 48, "Finished"
End Sub

And here's the code for BUTTON 2:

Sub Click(Source As Button)
    Dim ws As New NotesUIWorkspace
    Dim session As New NotesSession 
    Dim bookmarkdb As NotesDatabase 
    Dim outline As NotesOutline 
    Dim entry As NotesOutlineEntry 
    Dim childentry As NotesOutlineEntry
    Dim folder As NotesView
    Dim vec As NotesViewEntryCollection
    
    Set bookmarkdb = Session.GetDatabase("", "bookmark.nsf") 
    
    Set outline = bookmarkdb.GetOutline("UserBookmarkOrder") 
    
    Set entry = outline.GetFirst() 
    
    'This will find and delete the bookmark folder containing the links for the Last State, if they exist
    Do While Not entry Is Nothing 
        If entry.Label = "Startup" Then 
            Do While entry.HasChildren
                Set childentry = outline.GetNext(entry)
                Call outline.RemoveEntry(childentry)
            Loop
            Call outline.save()
            Goto ExitLoop
        Else 
            Set entry = outline.GetNext(entry)
        End If 
    Loop 
    
ExitLoop:
    
    'We need to remove the "link" documents from the Startup folder
    Set folder = bookmarkdb.GetView("$Startup")
    Set vec = folder.AllEntries
    Call vec.RemoveAll(True)
    
    'This will enable the "Save Window State on Exit" user preference
    Call session.SetEnvironmentVar( "SaveStateOnExit", "1", True)
    Messagebox "You will need to restart your Notes client for the settings to take effect", 48, "Finished"
End Sub