Ben Poole

What we take for granted

As Notes developers, I think we sometimes take for granted a lot of the stuff the product offers us. For example, I was coding a Lotusscript agent yesterday in release 5, and my head was so stuck in "Java land" that I started looking at using a custom class or function for "exploding" a string. in other words, the script equivalent of the StringTokenizer Java class. What a doofus! Of course, Notes 6 offers the developer a function for this (StrToken) which I've used before... but then suddenly, after grabbing Johan's excellent code, I slapped myself upside the head, and did this:

Const K_MACRO = {@Explode(txtDeptStructure; "\\")}
varStructures = Evaluate(K_MACRO, doc)

Update: In the end I used an explodeString function. I had to, as I had a need to tokenize some string variables generated by the code in addition to the field value above. Oh well. The code works well. And it's recursive! I love recursion <insert geek joke here >.

Posted at 12:42 on 21 Mar 2003  |  Categories:   |   (5 comments)

Comments

1. Just be aware of the following caveat: link
   on 21 Mar 2003 by john marshall (#)
2. Thanks John, yeah the code I posted is working code in an app that needs to explode using the "\" char. That's why I have it doubled up, 'cause as we know, it's an escape character in Notes. So I had to escape the escape...
   
   on 21 Mar 2003 by Ben Poole (#)
3. R6 has a built in Explode LotusScrip function
   on 22 Mar 2003 by jake (#)

4. You are right Ben, But beyond just the tokenizer stuff I want to remark the great approach we can take of the Evaluate statement (both in LotusScript and Java), since it give us the power of the @Formulas in a snap. That is one of my favorite LotusScript and Java statements, and I use it frequently. In fact I always have something like:

   Dim myF as string
   
   Dim myEv as variant
   
   myf = {some formula, from @DBLookups to
   some other usefull stuff}
   
   myEv  = Evaluate(myF)
   

   Obviously I use the doc parameter when you want to evaluate the @Formula against a particular document. Very useful .
   ::AleX::.
   Dominocode.Net

   on 22 Mar 2003 by Alex Hernandez (#)
5. Jake, you mean Split yeah? Alex, agreed, Evaluate is very useful. I always used to shy away from it on account of the horrendous memory leaks in r4.x, but now it's great stuff.
   on 22 Mar 2003 by Ben Poole (#)

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