LDD Show Reponses

Adds a [+] link next to message links on the developerWorks forums to view them inline instead of having to open multiple pages.

This used to be a Greasemonkey script designed to be used with the forums on the Notes.net/LDD/Lotus developerWorks site. ( http://www.lotus.com/ldd ) This has since been reworked into a Chrome extension. If you have no idea what Greasemonkey used to be, start here: Firefox users (the original): http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/ IE users (the copy): http://www.daishar.com/blog/archives/2005/03/greasemonkey_fo.html I've only tested this script with Firefox, so I have no idea how well it does or doesn't work with IE. =========================== The problem with the LDD forums is that you can't see the text of any of the responses associated with a particular message. You get a list of links to the responses at the bottom of the page, but you can only open a single message at a time -- which is a huge pain if there are more than about 2 responses to a message. What this script does (thanks to the magic of Greasemonkey) is to add a little [+] next to each response link at the bottom of the page. If you click on that [+], it will open a <div> beneath the link that will get populated with the message body for that particular response. Click it again, and the response body disappears. As of version 1.3 of the script, the [+] is added on any LDD page that has an ?OpenDocument link, not just a message. So the script works when you're viewing a message, or the main view of a forum, or even a list of search results. If none of this makes sense, just go to: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf and open a message that has several responses, and then try to read the responses with and without this script enabled. =========================== A few efficiencies I've added to this script: 1. None of the response messages are retrieved until you actually click the [+]. This means when you view a message that has a large number of responses, your page will still load quickly (i.e. -- the browser won't be trying to get all of the responses when the page opens). The text of the responses is only retrieved when you click the [+]. 2. If you click on a [+] to view a response message and then click it again to make it disappear, it will remember what the message is. So if you click it again to expand the response message before you refresh the page, you won't have to make another round trip to the server in order to get the message again -- it'll just come right up. 3. The responses are retrieved using asynchronous XML HTTP requests, which grab the response doc, parse the message text, and insert it into a <div> (this process is normally referred to as "Ajax" these days). =========================== ISSUES: 1. I had to hardcode several things in here, because the LDD forums don't really package up the messages in any kind of easily parsable way (say, with divs). Some or all of this script could break tomorrow if the LDD folks decide to rename some of their image files. 2. There's probably a much more elegant way of doing some or all of this using regular expressions. I don't know how that way might work, and I don't really care. This method seems to work, and it's easy to troubleshoot. 3. There may be a few links on the page that get the [+] appended to them that get an "Error finding beginning of body" message when you try to expand them (like the FAQ link). This is because the links don't actually point to messages, but other pages that don't parse like a message will. I thought about adding some code that explicitly ignores these kinds of links, but all of the exclusions would just muddy up the code, and I'd probably have to keep adding new ones. So rather than try to account for all the exceptions, I'm going to assume that my users are smart enough not to worry about those sorts of things. (UPDATE: in version 1.4 I added the ignoreList array to deal with at least some of these cases.) =========================== HISTORY: version 1.0 -- April 16, 2005 Initial release. version 1.1 -- April 16, 2005 Fixed bug where the </table> tag I was using to determine the start of the body block didn't exist when you were logged in, so you wouldn't get message text if you were logged in. version 1.2 -- April 17, 2005 Modified the script to make the display div block style "display: none;" when the div was hidden, to get rid of the extra whitespace/linefeed that was appearing between each of the response links. version 1.3 -- April 19, 2005 Changed the script to run against any ?OpenDocument link, not just the response links that were found at the bottom of a message. This way it will work not only on message pages, but also on views and search results. Unfortunately, this also puts a [+] next to some links that won't expand properly (like the forum FAQ links at the right of the page). I thought about filtering those links out manually, but it's probably better to have a few links that don't work right rather than hardcoding several exceptions in this code (there's too much hardcoding as it is). Also made a small change to account for a different separator graphic on the ND7 forums, and made the [+] change to [-] when it's "expanded". version 1.4 -- May 10, 2005 Added the ignoreList array (and relevant ignoreList processing), so we won't process links that we know will not work. Thanks to Christopher Byrne (http://controlscaddy.com) for the suggestion and an example of what to ignore. version 1.5 -- August 14, 2005 Added the endOfBody array (and relevant processing) to account for multiple possible endings of the body part of the forum message. The forums were slightly redesigned in late July/early August, and they started using a different graphic at the end of the body. With the new array, it'll be easier to add new end-of-body conditions in the future. version 1.6 -- December 3, 2005 LDDMonkey stopped working when Firefox got upgraded to 1.5. Kurt Higley (http://www.higs.net) fixed it within a day! His changes included: * expander.onclick = ... changed to expander.addEventListener('click', ...) * calls to XMLHttpRequest changed to GM_xmlhttpRequest * restructure getResponseText() function to split it out a little better I made a few changes to the URL processing, but otherwise included the changes as-is. Thanks Kurt! I also added "https://*.lotus.com/ldd*" to the @include list for when you're logged in to the forum, and made it possible for the script to try to reload a response message if an earlier attempt never returned anything (which seems to happen at times). Tested with Firefox 1.0.7/Greasemonkey 0.5.1 and Firefox 1.5/Greasemonkey 0.6.4 version 1.7 -- July 18, 2006, Peter LaComb 1: At the end of getXMLText, just before inserting the body into the DIV I added this line: bodyText = bodyText.replace(/<img\b(.*?)10x10.gif[^>]*>/g,""); This removes all the annoying blank boxes that show up. 2: Updated so that when used in a view, it will retrieve the response list, and allow you to expand the responses. version 1.8 -- September 16, 2010, Lars Berntrop-Bos Added 1.7 version history and formatted code. Submitted to Julian for publication on OpenNTF =========================== This is version 1.8 of the lddresponse.user.js script by Lars Berntrop-Bos ( http://www.nsftools.com ) June 3, 2014 You can do anything you'd like with this script, just don't hold me liable for anything, and don't pretend like you wrote it yourself. The latest release should always be available at the OpenNTF site, at: http://www.OpenNTF.org/projects/pmt.nsf/ProjectLookup/LDDMonkey