XPageDeveloper.com

UPDATE: Post with fully working example with serverside redirects working

One of the great things with XPages is the partial refresh that help you to update information inside the page without a full reload of the page. Well that is not possible with older notes applications because it does a full roundtrip to the server each time we change something. But we can update the screen without the users notice it with ajax. What I did was create a copy of the main js function that Domino uses _doClick and replace that with my own copy of that function in onload.

function onloadAjax(){

  window._doClickNew=window._doClick

  window._doClick=window.newDoClick

}

I store the original function within _doClickNew that is the great thing in this case with javascript. Everything is an object including functions and I can place myself before the original function. My function will now be called when something happens on the Domino form. There is two types of events on a old school Domino form. There is a refresh post and a full post, the script detects if you are trying to do a refresh post and convert that into a ajax request. You can also add entries to an Javascript array PartialRefreshArray by pushing new entries PartialRefreshArray.push(“mybutton”) if you then add a button to the form with the id mybutton it will also be ajax refreshed.

But there are some down sides to this functionality, we can’t use server side redirects. When the form is posted the referer is used when returning data, and because we have ajax refreshed the form the url isn’t updated correctly if we have created the document using the following url

server/database/form?openform

What we need to do is to create the document before we open it the first time and load the document using

server/database/view/UNID?editDocument

If that is used the code can imitate partial refresh, but remember no server side redirects can be used, webquerysave agent runs but not the redirect, so if you want to move away from the form you need to use client side JS.

I’ve created a simple database to show the functionality that you can download here 

Conclusion, the partial refresh behaviour can be added but then you need to hack any redirects done using agents and you need to pre create the document and have a scheduled agent to delete the forms not saved.

This is only an hack example not any production code, and may stop working if IBM/HCL changes anything.