Developing a Palm VII PQA that reads data from a Domino database (Page 2)

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Developing a Palm VII PQA that reads data from a Domino database (continued)

Which HTML features are not supported?
There are several HTML 3.2 tags that are not available to you when developing the PQA and Web clipping scripts. They are:

Image Maps
Animated GIFs
Cookies
Nested Tables
Frames
JavaScript
Java Applets
Style Sheets
Named Typefaces

A Simple PQA application
Many Lotus Notes developers have written customer tracking databases in Notes. Since this article is intended to help Notes developers build PQAs, it seems reasonable to use such a customer tracking database as an example.

Let's take a look at a PQA that will return a list of customers from a simple customer tracking database using the Palm VII. The code below shows a text file called Customer.html that can be compiled with the Query Application Builder tool. As you can see, the file contains standard HTML tags as well as a form with a submit button that, when tapped with the stylus, posts that form to a Domino server.


<html>

<head>

<title>PalmBuilder</title>

<meta name="PalmComputingPlatform" content="true">

</head>

<body>

<p><p>

<hr>

<h3 align=Center>PalmBuilder.com</h3>

<h1 align=Center>Customer Tracking Demo</h1>

<h4 align=Center>Developed by Bruce Elgort</h4>

<h5 align=Center>DominoPower and PalmPower</h5>

<center>

<hr>

<p>

<form method="post" action="http://yourwebserver/customer.nsf/pqaCustomerQuery?OpenAgent";>

Enter a Customer Name: <input type=text value="" name="Customer">

<input type=Submit value="Go">

<p>

</center>

</form>

</body>

</html>

Notice that when our form is posted to the Domino server the pqaCustomerQuery agent is actually run. This agent will take the data from the form and generate a Web clipping that will be sent to the Palm VII for display. Let's look at the form tag again:


<form method="post" action="http://yourwebserver/databases/customer.nsf/pqaCustomerQuery?OpenAgent";>

Figure A shows the Query Application Builder tool with the Customer.html file loaded. To build the PQA, select Build PQA from the File menu. When you build the PQA, you can supply a name that will be displayed underneath the icon on the Palm VII. You can also select a custom icon you may have developed.

FIGURE A

The Query Application Builder tool with our sample file Customers.html loaded. Roll over picture for a larger image.

If our PQA consisted of more than one file and/or graphic, all of them would be listed in the Query Application Builder.

Now that the PQA is built, the HotSync program can be used to install it onto the Palm VII. Figure B shows the Customers icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Palm VII display.

FIGURE B

The Customers PQA icon is shown on the Palm VII.