After having tested, tried, read, watched all I could do, find about Domino VOLT, I was starting to feel frustrated.
I’m more a hands-on guide then a reader of instruction manuals. I prefer to reverse-engineer and learn from the example.
Today I realised that these last days I was kind of stuck, and I was convinced I was stuck the same way then when starting to use Notes 2 almost 30 years ago.
I was missing something. Or I was looking at Volt from the wrong angle.
30 years ago, my programming was done in an advanced Basic (Memsoft), with multikey files.
So the coding was sequential.
Starting to develop with Notes, I hit a plateau as I was just not getting the views, forms, etc.
One day, a colleague (thank you Patrick Günter) was able to shine a different light on Notes and that was it.
I had understood and was able so start serious developement.
Today I finally understood I was looking at Volt with my Notes radar and was not using the right wavelenght…
I think I can explain the major difference this way.
In Volt, you have forms and views. And in the application to develop, you may
– open a view
– compose a document
basically that’s it
If you compose a document, and save it, you get a blank screen. You actually don’t see the result in a view like in Notes.
To see that you have to program it. It is not there out of the box.
While you are developping you don’t see any view. You create forms and for each form, there will be a corresponding view to browse through the data, page by page.
From that view you can edit or create new records
Because I had not dataset available in Excel, this part was not visible to me, which explains my unease these days
Now once I had imported a simple table and then deployed my test database, I found out that from the application manager, the ‘Show data’ option opened something akin to the view manager in a notes database, and that the ‘Launch’ option enabled me to create a record – one menu option for each existing form, akin to the Create menu in a notes database.
Now, coming from Notes, the web environment is not at the center of our preocupations. In VOLT it is.
So for each form, you get an http://…. link that enables inputing the form, in fullscreen mode or inside an iframe (= compose a document).
You get a link to show the data (= open a view). Another link enables you to shwo graphs about the data.
And you get this for each form in the application.
Armed with this, you can integrate that data into whichever website you are working on to give it data handling capabilities.
Lego pieces if you prefer.
To me this is the xPages we ought to have had back in 2010. But then again, it was another decade, and now we are in our new time-space and not the old one.
Now, the other issue I had was that as I had create a form before importing data from a spreadsheet, once I wanted to do it, it did not work.
VOLT cannot match the columns to existing fields just like that. So what you have to do is input on the first line of each column the variable name of each field.
Makes sense, but when you’ve tested creating apps by importing spreadsheets and letting VOLT create the forms, it needs to be said.
And these imports onto an existing dataset or for the first time are possible from the ‘Show data’ function where for each form there is a tab in which the view is shown and from which you may import.
Well, as my grandfather used to say : if you explain things to me for a long time, I understand quickly….
Guess that now my VOLT light is turned ON !
This is my comment