Imagine giving your IBM Lotus Notes users super quick and convenient searching of Internet or intranet sites in just a few simple development steps: Notes automatically highlights certain types of text in users’ Notes documents, and they can perform a search on that text by right clicking it and selecting a search widget. The Notes 8.0.1 client Live Text feature makes it possible. I’ll show you how to create a custom search widget in Notes that “listens” for the live text you configure the client to recognize. You can then publish the widget along with the “recognizer” (the Notes configuration for recognizing the text) to a shared widget catalog.

The development steps I show you are a stepping-stone on the way to powerful, cross-platform functionality. The widget you will create using Notes 8.0.1 features can only be used in Notes clients. However, in my next article I’ll show how you can reuse portlets hosted on IBM WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Application Server, or Mashups by making them available to Notes users as live-text-enabled widgets. That article will build on the development methods and tools in both this article and my previous one — “Develop Widgets for IBM Lotus Mashups and Notes 8” (THE VIEW online knowledgebase, February 2009).

In order to follow the widget examples in this article, you should have a basic understanding of XML and the Notes 8 GUI. To use the example widgets in Notes, the client must be at release 8.0.1 or higher.