Re: Modifying DOM before netWindows tree widget created.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for your help.  I was being quite stupid - the answer was way simpler than any of you would have realised, because you wouldn't have been so dumb to have been in my position :-)  As I told Michael, it is working fine (well, still got a minor display error in IE, but I'll return to that at a more sane hour tomorrow...)

I had a look at the tarball, and it is a later version than that which I have been using -  0.4.0pre3 which I downloaded from the netwindows.org site.  I will stick with what I have for the moment, unless there is something really yummy in this later version.

Just for your information, last week I quite quickly had the tree widget working with a (less complex, only 1 level deep) Domino view.  The tree widget in this instance contains 390 nodes, and the page size (almost entirely markup) is 90kb.  These entries are mostly just 'Subject', 'Author', 'Date' and 'Category', so usually 1 or 2 lines long at most.  As a rough estimate, from request to full rendering with IE can take anywhere from 15 - 65 seconds.  But various versions of Mozilla and Firefox take around 5-7 seconds (this is on the LAN).  Most of that time is spent in rendering the page (the server returns the data within 2 seconds the first time, and less than 60msecs on subsequent calls).  I mostly work in Firefox, so I hadn't realised that there was such a big difference between it and IE.  

To test what I have been writing to you about, I created 390 discussion documents in quite a complex hierarchy, to see if my pre-nw Javascript restructuring of the document would add a noticeable delay.  I'm glad to say it doesn't seem to be that significant.  Again this view and page is of a similar size to the one above, and the processing durations are still quite different for these two browsers.  Once more Mozilla/Firefox processes this more complex document in about 8-9 seconds, whilst IE seems to take 28-44 seconds (this increase in speed could be due to the display error mentioned above - IE is not fully displaying the view in a nested form, so maybe my javascript programming is missing something...not sure what as it works in Mozilla).

As this is for my own public site, I will advise people that the site works better and faster with a Mozilla browser.   However, since most people are using IE, it might be that there are some optimizations that can be made to level this difference.  I mentioned to Michael that Domino can be asked to return different depths and lengths of a view, so I think I can tweak the size of the returned data so that users will still be able to do more client side navigating than they would otherwise, without there being a noticeable delay.

My apologies if I sounded a bit exasperated in my plea for help yesterday.  Working with netWindows has been the easy part.  Trying to get Domino to output the view structure so it would work was a pain.  When I gave up on that it was even more of a pain learning how to do the DOM manipulation with Javascript (well, it induced me to finally get to grips with Venkman).  When I couldn't finally slot it into nw last night, I was annoyed with myself that I may have wasted my time by tackling things the wrong way round.  

Anyway, I'm going to be using the sorted table and the tree widget.  I am sure there are other goodies in there that I will return to later.  So, thanks again guys for this oustanding tool, and for you great support - I've been looking at a commercial Java tool at the same time, and you guys have come through with helpful suggestions far quicker then they do.  And I know that with their tool there will soon be a wall beyond which I can't learn any more from it, but I feel with nw I could learn a masive amount.

I plan to write up how I got this working with Domino, and let some other people know about it (although first I want to get a shiny example working).

Regards,
Bernard

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