DXLPeek

Successor to NotesPeek; drill into your databases and export your design and data.

DXLPeek

Install

Domino console command to install this app on your server:

tell Genesis install dxlpeek

Install in MyAccount (for Prominic customers only)

Source code

View on GitHub, OpenNTF etc

In 2003, many of us were discussing (lamenting) the slow death of NotesPeek (thanks again IBM). Plenty of people had ideas on this (including me - http://www.openntf.org/mainbar.nsf/ByTopicWeb/A9E52C31A2417FCB88256D45000C079E?OpenDocument), but nobody stepped up to the plate at that time.

Then, early in 2004 Mac Guidera and I started defining the various APIs that would be required to get this done. We settled on a 3 tier approach with a Java class to do the actual exporting of DXL; DXLRetriever - a tiny java scriptlibrary (could probably be a .jar eventually).

Next, we built an agent to provide a HTTP calling mechanism so that DXLRetriever could be accessed by a web client; DXLService - simple url based query to request DXL. Future plans for this include conversion to a servlet as well as full web service compliance (WSDL, UDDI, the whole shebang).

Finally (and this is what took all the time), we wrote a web-based UI with hooks into DXLService. This UI tool allows authorized users to 'peek' into any database on a server; DXLPeek - the successor to NotesPeek.

The beta of DXLPeek has been through three revisions so far with another planned in early 2005. We believe that DXLPeek is stable and we welcome you to try it and let us know your thoughts.

We've had suggestions including showing deletion stubs, supporting Mozilla, and allowing DXLPeek to be an editor not just a reader (which could be posted back into your database). We need to hear from you to know what you want, so please download today!

Ian Sherwood & Mac Guidera

UPDATE: 2005-09-30
The DXL engine in ND6.5 is still not rock solid, and as a result we feel there is little value in extending or improving the DXLPeek suite past it's current state. The current release of DXLPeek suite provides an API level wrapper for accessing DXL (look at DXLRetriever), a web service for accessing DXL (look at DXLService), and a gui for accessing DXL (DXLPeek). All of these layers are functional (yes, we know of a few bugs - sorry), but for DXL to be truly useful the underlying DXL Importer and Exporter classes in Domino need to improve. We understand that IBM is planning improvements for the next release (after 7) and we will re-evaluate at that time, but for now, we are not planning any improvements to the DXLPeek suite.

Please understand that DXLRetriever and DXLService are fully functional, production ready code and have already been in service for thousands of hours in production environemnts. The DXLPeek gui has a few quirks and intended as a lightweight browsing tool to fill the void left when IBM stopped improving NotesPeek.

Version: 1.0.0

{
    "title": "DXLPeek v${version} (OpenNTF)",
    "versionjson": "${versionjson}",

    "config":
    {
        "version": "${version}"
    },

    "steps": [
    {
        "title": "--- Step 1. Download file ---",
        "files": [
            {"from": "${baseurl}/0/${docid}/$FILE/dxlpeek.nsf", "to": "${directory}/dxlpeek.nsf"}
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "--- Step 2. Sign database ---",
        "databases": [
             {
                "action": "update",
                "filePath": "dxlpeek.nsf",
                "sign": true
              }
        ]
    },
    {
        "title": "--- Step 3 (final). Completed ---",
        "messages": ["You have installed DXLPeek v${version} (OpenNTF)"]
    }

    ]
}