Avoiding Hard Coding of Group Names.

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Why? Because Group names change; over time, between your Development, UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and Production enviroments, between diffenet customers.

How? By far the best way to reduce hard coding is with a Global Profile Doc, that is a profile document without a username, to store information for all users of the database. Any and all piece’s of data from outside your application should be placed in a admin profile document, and a great many intianl peices as well, Wheather or not your applications bussiness users adminsrate them or a techinal adminstrator does.

As a demonstration, I’ll improve a previous entry, Using the Lotus DBlookup to better Leverage the Name and Address book and make it better.

In the Case of reducing the Hard Coding of group names, on your Admin Profile form (call it “profileAdmin”) add a Name field for the PHB approvers group called (what else) “Name_PHB_Approvers_GroupName” which use can populate with a standard “Use Address dialog for choices”.

then rather that using :

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key :="Pointy_Hair_Bosses_with_Authority_in_this_Line_of_Business";

in your , use :

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 key := @GetProfileField( "profileAdmin"; "Name_PHB_Approvers_GroupName" );

to retrieve the value. Remember that you can also retrieve profile document field values in lotusscript as well.

A further feature to add to your profile documents, to make it “one place shopping”, is to make it easier to view or edit the group just selected by making a click-able (button or image ) to open, in read mode, the selected Group Document from the Name and address book (NaB).

I’ve done this by placing a image next to the field, surrounded by a action hotspot which calls a lotus subroutine :

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    OpenNabGroupforDisplay ("Name_PHB_Approvers_GroupName")

which calls this lotusScript:

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Sub OpenNabGroupforDisplay (groupFieldName As String)
' pass the name of the field containing the group name, on the currently open document.
On Error Goto onError
Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace
Dim uidoc As NotesUIDocument
Dim session As New NotesSession
Dim db As NotesDatabase
Dim nabDB As NotesDatabase
Dim view As NotesView
Dim doc As NotesDocument
Dim GroupName As String
Dim Guidoc As NotesUIDocument        if groupFieldName = "" then
messagebox "No FieldName supplied, contact your Notes Developer"
Exit Sub
end if' get the value in the field name
Set db = session.CurrentDatabase
Set uidoc = workspace.CurrentDocument
groupName = uidoc.FieldGetText( groupFieldName  )
If groupName = "" Then
messagebox "No value for " & groupFieldName & " supplied."
Exit Sub
End If  ' get the group by groupName for this Server in the NaB.
Set nabDB = session.GetDatabase( db.Server, "Names.nsf")
Set View  = nabDB.GetView( "($VIMGroups)" )
Set doc = view.GetDocumentByKey( groupName, True)
If doc Is Nothing Then
messagebox "Cannot find a group by the name " & groupName & "."
Exit Sub' open the group in read mode
Set GuiDoc = workspace.EditDocument( False, doc)Exit Sub
onError:
Messagebox "System Error " & Err() & ": " & Error$  & ", line: " & Erl
Exit Sub
End Sub

Question: I have not been able to find the image (.gif) that the Notes client uses when you paste in a Doc Link (Document Link), which would be my preferred image in this case.

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