Contributing editor Dan Velasco is only too happy to help when he receives a bit of mail from one of his adoring Australian fans who's having trouble generating text with a hotspot property attached to it.

Australian hotspots
I'm a big fan of your work with DominoPower. I usually frequent it for cool technical information. I'm not sure whether you're inclined to answer simple tech questions, but I'm at a bit of a loss here. I'm a Lotus Notes developer and have been coding in LotusScript for a while now. However, I must say that I haven't even begun to fully realize the power of this language.

I'm currently at a loss with a task that's been put before me, and that is to generate URL hotspots in a Rich Text field using a LotusScript agent. I know you can embed objects and do fancy text manipulation using the notesrichtext class, but I haven't got a clue as to how to generate a text with a hotspot property attached to it. It may be silly of me to ask you this, but I thought it's worth a try!

Thanks for your enlightening knowledge.

Ayn Hopper

Dan Velasco responds
Thank you very much for your email. Receiving messages like yours makes me realize that the extra hours I spend every month writing articles for DominoPower are worth every minute.

The quick and dirty way to generate URL hotspots, as you might already know, is just to insert the full URL into the text (including "http://";) and Domino will automatically make this into a link. What it seems like you are looking for, however, is to create a link that has text, such as "Link here for more information," with a specific URL behind it, such as http://www.dominopower.com.

I don't currently know of a way to do this, but I'll definitely look into it. If I find a way, I'll be sure to share it with you and others via a DominoPower tip.