Since the release of Lotus XPages we have seen a number of significant contributions from IBM and the Notes community to assist developers learn how to harness the power of this new technology.  It all started with Declan Lynch's 54 Part series.  Since then we have seen many great bloggers such as Julian Buss, John Mackey, Tim Tripcony, Tommy Valand, Stefan Wissel, Paul Withers, and many others contribute great technical content for XPages.  We now also have some great XPage applications available on OpenNTF to download and dissect.  At Lotusphere 2010 there were some excellent technical presentations on XPages, the best perhaps being the BOF session attended by the entire XPage development team.  Last week, another great asset was added to the Lotus XPage technical collection, A Webcast  from IBM - A Deep Dive on building Notes/Domino Applications with XPages.  If there are any XPage developers out there who have not yet had a chance to view this Webcast, I would highly recommend it.  It is a 2 hour video so I thought it might help to provide a synopsis of what is covered by that presentation to assist both you and your favorite search engine match the specific aspects of XPages covered.

This presentation does exactly what its title suggests.  It is perhaps best viewed by people who have already started doing some XPage development, but certainly doesn't require that you already be an expert in XPages.  The session includes a high level overview of the XPages architecture along with a roadmap for XPages since its inception with 8.5.0.  This includes new features being added with 8.5.2 along with features we are likely to see in 8.5.3 and 9.0.  The bulk of the session is a show and tell given by two of IBM's leading XPage developers  Martin Donelly, and Tony McGukin.

Martin's session focuses on some of the capabilities built into the View data source.  And while the examples given focus on the View control, they also can be applied to the Repeat control and the Data Table control.  Most of the functionality being shown has been available since 8.5.0 but its potential has probably not been well documented.  I certainly learnt a lot.  The parameters covered include:-

1. expandLevel - Allows control over the number of levels to be automatically expnded when displaying a view
2. parentID - Allows the collection to be restricted to just those documents with be specific parent document
3. search - A search to be performed against the view collection
4. keys - A view filter based upon the keys for one or more sorted columns
5. requestParamPrefix - Allows parameters to be passing via a URL when more than one View datasource is contained on an Xpage.
6. databaseName - On how setting this value to blank can be used to refer to the current database.
7. Using JavaScript to define column values
8. categoryFilter - This was supposed to work in 8.5.0 with multiple categorized columns.  It finally does work as designed in 8.5.2
9. alwaysCalculateLast - a new parameter being added with 8.5.2 that will control the ability to jump to the last page of a view.

Tony's session provided an introduction to a number of ways in which the power of XPages can be extended using companion technologies.  This includes:-

1. dojo  - Adding dojo capabilities to XPage controls via dojoType and dojoAttributes.
2. Simple invocatiion of AJAX via Partial Update
3. Interfacing with Java/JSF with an example of using Managed Beans to add state to your application.
4. themeId - Linking controls to a theme file and the opportunities this provides to theme both the look/feel and the behaviour of an application.

The level of details provided by this Webcast is typically only available when attending LotusSphere or major LUG events so it is great to see this quality of technical presentation given by IBM via a WebCast.