My current work project involves displaying arbitrary views from various databases into a combined reporting site (written in XPages). This has presented me with two hurdles: pulling in the data completely and accurately and then figuring out a good way to format it.

The former problem is one of the few areas where it seems like "classic" Domino development has an edge: views render rapidly and, as long as you've configured the server to display lots of rows or add in pager controls, completely. And with the recent "enhanced HTML" property, they generally get tagged with some useful CSS classes. The default XPages xp:viewPanel control, by contrast, needs the column definitions at design time, which makes it tough to work with. You can sort of roll your own with nested xp:repeat controls, but you quickly run into problems with categories and other Notes-y features. Fortunately, the Extension Library, as usual, comes to the rescue: the  xe:dynamicViewPanel does pretty much what you want: you give it a view and it renders it out nicely. Using it, you don't have to worry about handling categories, you can add in standard pagers, and you can include all the standard filtering and searching options on the view. It's not perfect (yet), though: it doesn't handle fixed-value columns (like a formula of "hi"), use color-column information, follow column hide-when formulas (though it supports the static "hide this column" checkbox), do Notes-style bracketed pass-through-HTML, process special text, or honor "show values in this column as links." These are all understandable limitations, being as they are either rarely encountered or technically difficult. Unfortunately, I've run into all of them rapidly, so I don't know if I can use xe:dynamicViewPanel as-is. The best thing to do would be for me to roll up my sleeves, implement these features in it, and submit my changes, and maybe I'll do that down the line, but there'd be a lot of learning overhead before that point. What I've taken to in the mean time is a Java class to write out the view contents as HTML. I add the color-column info via inline style="..." attributes, look up the hide-whens by exporting the DXL and then running them through session.evaluate (read: not fast), and split and recombine the strings to handle pass-through-HTML. Unfortunately, I lose speed (because I'm presumably not as good at this as IBM's programmers) and the flexibility to easily use searching, filtering, and paging. The first two will be relatively easy to implement, but paging will be a problem, since the XPage just gets back a big string blob. I could return Java data structures, but then I'd run into problems with categories. I could write classes to dynamically add XSP elements to the page, but at that point I'd be best off cracking open the ExtLib source code anyway.

The other problem is that, regardless of how I render the view, it can be tough to actually display all the data well on a web page. For normal views, with a handful of columns, it's fine to just plop it right on the page and be done with it. However, it doesn't take much to make the table look like crap: headers that are way too long, large strings in the row data, or just having lots of rows all very quickly stretch or break the design. I think I'll try to handle the headers by adding some CSS text-overflow rules to keep them to a fixed width, which will also mean adding in a title="" attribute so the user can hover over them to see the full value. Still, not a big problem. Large data cell values are a bit tougher. Theoretically, I could do the same thing: have the data overflow and add a tooltip. That would work fine if it's a rare occurrence, but what if the whole point of the view is to be able to easily look at that data. I may try to pull out the row-height property from the view and use that to provide a max-height to each cell via inline CSS, so that way I could solve the problem on a view-by-view basis. I could consider doing the same with width as well, rather than going the default route of letting the content width determine the column width. Having a lot of rows can be partially solved with pagination (unless I'm going the "dump out a blob of HTML" route), but is that really a good user experience if the goal is to see all of the data? Paging on the web is pretty awkward, with the number of rows never exactly matching the height of the viewport, worrying about scrolling back to the top when going to the next page, and properly dealing with categories. Via CSS, I've made it so that the primary content area has its own scrollbars via absolute positioning and overflow: auto and that works pretty well for the most part, but I still run into trouble with views containing thousands of rows: with a lot of data, it simply takes a long time to download the HTML and render the table. There are a couple options provided by Dojo and the Extension Library that provide fixed-size grids to store data that I've tinkered around a bit, and maybe I'll settle on one of them, but in the mean time every solution has some serious problem that I quickly run into with my example data.