Introduction to Formula Language

Hi Partha,

Give him the URL to the Notes Designer help on the Notes website... I'm too lazy to look it up ;-)

Cheers!
    Sjef

Bro,
Your wish granted !

http://www-12.lotus.com/ldd/doc/domino_notes/Rnext/help6_designer.nsf//Main?OpenFrameSet

Partha

So Hemanth you have experience in attending lot of interviews too !... You are true expert man !

Partha

Thanks guys - I'll have a wade through these links and let you know. The opening is in the local Council's IT department here in Nottingham, UK.

Ben

Well I do consulting and I have lots of guys out there consulting for other companies and I thought I might give some help on what they might be intereseted.. And now my new friend is from UK :-) .. Probably sjef or crak can give some insights ??

Great Hemanth! I never knew you are into consulting..


Partha

My best @Formula advice is: pry the comma key off your keyboard. Construct a little lever in its place that presses the semicolon key when you try to type a comma.

Best thing you can do to learn the language is open up any database you can find and see how someone else has done stuff. Then, send EE a lot of your money to buy points you can use to ask questions here.

Barring the money, sign up for an account at Notes.net. They have a nice developer's forum there, though I've always found I get better, quicker answers here.

Good luck.

-- b.r.t.

Barry ...Pay me and I will dedicate my expertise to your notes issues.. what do you say :-)

Barry,

But I need the comma! The country I come from uses it as decimal 'point'. Can you imagine the problems? I'm just glad they didn't use any other flipping symbol. Where are the roots of the use of a semicolon as parameter separator? Lotus 1-2-3?

Sjef

Hemantha,

So, u can find me a job in India? If u have any, let me know.

-Thanks

What happened to your singapore job ??

HemanthaKumar --

I'm afraid all I have in my budget is question points, but I try to be reasonably generous with them. I assure you, I've appreciated your expertise on many questions in the past, which is why I'm telling beermuppet to get enough points to pay you with.

sjef-bosman --

I need my comma too, if only for LotusScript, VB, and the actual text I have to wrote. But there are times I wish I had alternate keyboard while working in @Formula. Switching languages always throws me for a loop!

-- b.r.t.

Barry,

Absolutely true. In my opinion, it all got worse when Domino got web-enabled. First there was just @Formula language, then LotusScript and C/C++. Now you have the possibility to add HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript and Java to your "solution", just to name a few. The complexity nowadays can be huge, due to an irrational demand for functionality. I can imagine organisations throwing away their old-fashioned systems, swapping them for down-to-earth Java/mySQL solutions. If they think they end up with a simple system, they easily forget that a webserver or JSP-server, HTML, CSS and JavaScript are still being used. Maintenance cost will go skyhigh.

As for the comma, I find it absolutely ridiculous that a decent language incorporates country-dependent real numbers! Define a language properly, and use a decimal point. The poor souls or unhappy few who have problems with this: tough! That the external representation is different, well okay, but internally it's got to be uniform. In this respect, I hate the comma, but in the meantime I got used to writing semicolons in @Formula language. It only gets difficult when you use the Evaluate statement a lot, or you generate JavaScript using either @Formula language or LotusScript: a mistake is easily made. Where can I order your lever? It's good I don't have to use the languages I learnt during my study, for I'd certainly make a real mess of it. Remember APL, SNOBOL, COBOL (millions of programmers in COBOL still), FORTRAN, and ALGOL? Interesting from an academic point of view.

And Beermuppet: get prepared, do ask your questions in this forum, and go for it!

Good luck!
Sjef

Barry.. I know you from the time you asked first question in this forum and you were one who appreciated the experts valuable inputs and their effort !

Let us wait and see ... some day it might turn out into real money ? Like the betting on sports online !

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your help

Ok... here's my plan. I'm going to dust off an old P200 (will that be enough?) box, install IIS (or something else quick and easy...is there anything better?, Domino Web Server and put developer on my desktop machine.

Then I'm going to download as many databases as I can lay my hands on and try and learn as much as poss in the limited amount of time (I have a friend in their IT department who can give me an idea of what they use domino for). The closing date for applications is the 18th, so I'll try and figure out what I need to learn, put on the form I have a basic understanding of domino and developer and what not on the application form and then learn as much possible before my interview (if i get one), and put as many examples of my work on a webserver (i can run that from home) so they can view them.

Does that sound like a good plan?

Beermuppet

Best of luck .

beermuppet,

Plan doesn't seem too bad. You'll get into trouble with IIS and Domino together, the configuration is not straightforward. I'd advise you NOT to put both on one system, but fellow experts myight have a different opinion. ("Ha, easy, just flicking a switch...").

Hope to see you back here after the 18th, and your interview... Lots of success!

Sjef

I believe the company has the setup beermuppet wants to simulate !!

Hemantha,

But will he be ready before the 18th? His purpose is to learn @Formula language, not setting up servers. He's got 5 (!) days, make it 120 hours. Only if the application involved both IIS and Domino you probably need to set it up. I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, ... (March Hare)

Sjef

That is true.. but he could be a avid learner ?? And for them the time really doesn't matter .. what do you say ?

Hemantha,

I've seen many an avid learner surrender to the clock :)

It may be clever to work for a company I heard a story about: they had an ad saying they work 8 days a week, 25 hours per day!

Sjef

It can be done.. When you maintain your own calendar of 8 days a week and 25 hrs a day or migrate to a distant planet :-)

HemanthaKumar,

That's why Marsians do more in a week! Clever green bastards!

Sjef

beermuppet --

Forget downloading lots of databases. Start with the ones you already have. With a Notes installation, you get lots of templates for "standard" discussions, journals, etc. Create a discussion database and dig into that. Any application you download will probably be more complicated than you want to start with.

Refer to the help files often as you're in the programmer pane. Many @Functions are well named (like @IsDocBeingEdited) but some are much less clear (like @Implode and @Explode -- which I have to look up every time I want to use one of them; I can never remember which is which).

Also, once you've called help for an @Formula, look in that left pane of the help window for the Formula Language section, and dig into the Formula Language rules. Pay special attention to the Operations on Lists, as you will be doing a lot of those. (Every field in a Notes document contains a list. The list may only have one element, but it's still a list. This becomes more important in LotusScript.)

Good luck, and bookmark EE.

-- b.r.t.

Hi Guys,

Thanks for the advice - I don't need to learn the lot by the 18th, once I have figured out what I need to learn, and whether its feasible I can put it on my application form, and then get down to learning it and knowing the Council it'll be a couple of weeks before any interviews etc, so I should be ok.

Thanks

Beermuppet