I haven’t really been posting too much technical yet on the new blog but this is one of my pastimes, reading through fixes. Especially ones that include “my” fixes, like the one in red below. Hard to believe this one wasn’t noticed before now — comments not being secured like their documents are. So anyone could see “RE: Should we fire Joe?” or perhaps “RE: Is Susan pulling her weight?” in the What’s New page. If Joe or Susan were admins, there’d be hell to pay.

Another fix of mine (I enjoyed this one, as I opened a PMR, gave the solution, writing my own undocumented qpconfig.xml node) has to do with the Preview capability in Quickr. You may know that Quickr, like Notes and iNotes, uses the KeyView viewer technology to preview certain types of files. Well, in some cases you don’t even want to try to invoke that viewer, you don’t even want to show the link “Preview” next to the file attachment. After staring at the corresponding widget for  while, I dug a bit in the DOM and discovered an element called “filetypes_not_supported” with an array of six values. But they had some spaces where they shouldn’t be, and only the first one of these “.zip” was actually hiding the Preview link. The rest were showing it.

I dug a bit further and found a corresponding area of qpconfig.xml where, if this setting could be controlled, I would expect it to be. I added the setting without the spaces, and voila, fixed the core code. And now as of Fixpack 35, there is a somewhat documented node in qpconfig.xml:

<filetypes_not_supported>.zip,.z,.exe,.bin,.nsf,.ntf</filetypes_not_supported>

Now why did I care? Well, I had written a few widgets to invoke the Adobe Acrobat embedded viewer instead of KeyView. The KeyView one is quite bad on some PDFs, especially ones with images. Because of this, we didn’t want the Preview link EVER to show up next to a PDF, regardless of the form. That’s what started this little hunt in the first place.

Recently, I expanded on the PDF viewer widget and turned it into more of a utility viewer-enabler widget for files of other MIME types that have native browser viewers. A client had asked me if I could build a QuickTime version (four kinds of files) for their training needs, so their videos would stream from the site. Good news, we could do that and now due to the fix above we can avoid the Preview link and hence user confusion.

Go forth and fix, people. I have two more “By the way, I already fixed it” PMRs going in this week, so watch out for those next time…I sure hope the support folks don’t mind me doing that. 🙂