Last night I implemented an "experimental" feature on this site. This morning I woke up and the web server had died. I'm hoping it's just a coincidence, but have a funny feeling it isn't.

New Feature?

Take a look at the screen shot below:

It will no doubt appear very familiar to you all. If not from reading articles on this site over the years then from the Notes.net Forums. It's the "Domino way" of rendering a discussion-style hierarchy of documents.

I've never really liked it though. It has to be one of the worst ways of holding a conversation. For years now I've wanted to do something about it, so yesterday I did.

Look now at the grab below, which is of the same page but with the new commenting system implemented.

Notice how the body of all the comments are shown inline and slight indented to show the relation to the one above.

Better, no?

You can see it for yourself by opening the article I took the grab from and scrolling down the feedback section.

How It Works

In order to implement the above solution I had to do some fairly major house-keeping in the backend. This database is more than 10 years old and it shows. If I started over now the database structure wouldn't look much it does. Until yesterday there were two "reply" forms. One to hold replies to blogs and one to hold replies to articles. They were similar, but different. Different for no real reason, so I've now created one form (and view) to hold all replies. All old replies (~20,000 documents) have had their Form field updated and various other fields added/removed. It took about an hour just to replicate all the changes! What I have now is much easier to maintain and build on.

Another part of the update was converting the Rich Text held in the some replies (to articles) in to plain text. No idea why I ever used a Rich Text field, but there you go. I did my best at preserving the formatting but some replies will be a bit screwy.

Yeah, but how does it work? Well, where there was once an embedded view there is now an empty Rich Text field, called "Feedback". The Web Query Open Agent fills this field with the nested "view".

The form looks like this:

Note that the document doesn't store a field called Feedback. It's only there as a place-holder for what happens next.

The code to populate the field looks something like this, in principal at least:

'Treats it as plain text without this line
'Hence 64kb limit without this line!
Call web.document.Removeitem("Feedback") 

Dim item as NotesRichTextItem           
Set item = web.document.CreateRichTextItem("Feedback")
                
Dim richStyle As NotesRichTextStyle
Set richStyle = web.session.CreateRichTextStyle
richStyle.PassThruHTML = True

Call item.AppendStyle(richStyle)
                
While not entry is nothing
        Call item.Appendtext(entry.ColumnValues(1))

        Set entry = nav.GetNextDocument(entry)
Wend

In reality the code is more complex, as it has to open and close all the nested LI elements as needed, but you get the idea.

Experimental?

As I said earlier, the HTTP task was dead this morning after adding this new feature last night. Whether it was because of this change I don't know and that's what I need to wait and find out.

There are articles with a lot of feedback and some with little. Not sure what the worst case is, but there's one with >100KB of feedback to render. Could this be bringing the HTTP task down? I don't see how or why.

Moving Forward

I know what you're thinking - aren't the Articles on this site just an archive? Well, kind of, although I do hope to start using them again at some point. What I wanted to do was improve the "archive" as well as test the approach.

I really hope I don't have to scrap this approach as my plan is to implement the same approach for the blog commenting. The code is in the template, I just need to refresh the design. Something's telling me to hold off though.

For now please treat this as just an idea. It will get improved with time if it turns out to be a viable solution. If not I'll look at alternatives though as I don't want to have to revert to the old approach and think it will be a great benefit to the blog commenting, which I've never like either.

Help Testing

To test this out I've created an article for you to add comments to please add comments to this blog entry. Let's see what happens.