The biggest gripe I have always had with Lotus Notes is that it sucks as a platform to write reports against. Sure, I know that I could learn Crystal Reports and use it to write fancy reports, but then how do I get those reports out to users who don't have Crystal loaded on their machines. Back in the Version 3 days of Notes, they had this really cool product called Notes VIP that had a native report writer built in. Notes VIP was where LotusScript got it's start in the Notes world and was meant to be a visual front end to Notes databases in the days just prior to the Browser Wars. Any ways, the best thing about the report writer was that you could create canned runtime reports that could be run by anyone without needing to install any additional software. Alas, VIP went the way of Lotus Components and Lotus Improv. LotusScript was integrated into Release 4 and the reporting software was sold off to a third party vendor (Can't remember exactly which one!). How I long for product that could easily write reports without the need for additional software and tons of additional training.

While it may not be perfect, I have found Excel to be a poor man's replacement for such a product. Over the years, I have built a set of "Export to Excel" design elements that I shove into every database I have. This allows me to setup an export that users can run as often as they need to without having to know anything about the design of the database. The form that sets up the export can be seen here. This allows users to export their data to a familiar tool and then slice it and dice it however they please. However, this does nothing to give the executives the pretty reports they yearn for on a daily basis.

For that, I have learned to turn to LotusScript agents and specifically to the use of List elements. If you have never heard of Lists before, here is the definition from the Designer Help file:

A list is a one-dimensional collection of elements of the same data type. You can change the size of a list at any time while the application is running and LotusScript does not allocate any storage space at compile time for the elements of a list. Lists automatically shrink or grow when elements are deleted from or added to them. You access each element in a list by a unique String value, called a list tag.

Basically, it's an array that works the way arrays should work. You don't have to specify the number of elements in the array and you access the values of the array with an identifier instead of a number. If this doesn't make complete sense to you, come back for part 2 of this entry and see an agent I recently wrote that makes extensive use of Lists.

Link to Part II
Link to Part III
Link to Part IV