What you may not have heard is that some XML functionality is available right now with Excel 97. This functionality can easily be exploited by Domino developers, opening up a whole new avenue for Notes information distribution.

This article will show you a -- in few simple steps -- how to turn a Lotus Notes view into an XML-equipped Web page. This new page can not only be viewed by a Web browser, but opened by Excel 97 -- complete with formulas and summed columns. Further, you'll see how to take one small XML step to condense large amounts of information into flexible Excel pivot tables, and how to use Web agents to work around limitations of Notes views.

The basics
When a standard Notes view is presented to a Web browser by the Domino server, it has been converted on the fly into an HTML table. The key here is to take direct control over that conversion procedure, creating the HTML directly in the view, rather than dynamically by the Domino task.

Views have one major limitation in the current Domino server -- they are automatically broken down into individual Web pages. The number of lines in each snapshot can be set only once for every database on the server. These snapshots have two consequences -- only small spreadsheets can be delivered as Web pages using views (up to the default lines-per-view setting in the HTTP section of the Name and Address Book Server document) and you must supply your own navigation icons in custom views to move back and forward between pages

The view method will be used here to demonstrate the principles of HTML (and XML) customization. For spreadsheets beyond the size of a snapshot, an alternative method, using agents, will be used, building on these basic principles.

Web tables
Tables in HTML have a simple structure, composed mostly of table (<TABLE>), row (<TR>), header (<TH>) and data (<TD>) tags, as in this example:-

<TABLE> <TR><TH>Quarter<TH>Earnings<TH>Profit <TR><TD>Q198<TD>30000<TD>5000 <TR><TD>Q298<TD>42000<TD>8000 </TABLE>