Moving IBM Lotus Domino Designer to the Eclipse platform has opened a new world of extensibility and customizability opportunities to developers. No longer restricted to using error-prone C add-in development to add features to Designer, you can now write Eclipse plug-ins for Domino Designer on Eclipse (DDE) 8.5 and above, taking advantage of a variety of Eclipse and DDE extension points to add functionality for both UI and back-end logic.

Using Eclipse APIs, you can create a wide range of helpful tools, like the batch processing of design elements and one-click imports of frequently used script libraries. You can even customize Designer’s user interface — for example, add your own design element properties to the property panel (like the width and height in pixels of image resources).

We’ll provide a useful example of using Eclipse APIs to enhance DDE as we take you through the steps for integrating LotusScript doc (LSDoc) support into DDE. LSDoc is a very popular development tool created by Mikkel Heisterberg that generates well-formatted code documentation for LotusScript, similar to Javadoc for the Java language. Version 2 of LSDoc has been completely rewritten in Java, so it integrates better into the Java-based Eclipse world — it is faster, scales better with large database designs, and it can be seamlessly used in Eclipse plug-ins.

LSDoc generates HTML files for LotusScript documentation and stores them in a Notes database. However, it does not provide a mechanism to display those files. The files are served by the local Web preview of DDE, which requires Anonymous access to the LSDoc database; otherwise, the LSDoc database needs to be placed on a Domino server, which is not an option if you need to use LSDoc offline. In addition, there is no direct integration into Domino Designer yet. The documentation has to be opened in a separate browser window.

We’ll show you how you can solve these two issues by creating a new DDE/Eclipse feature that carries its own Web server and displays the LSDoc content for the currently selected design element in a new visual area of DDE, an Eclipse ViewPart.