Installing the XPages Extension Library for Domino Designer 9.0.1

Main Steps to Install the XPages Extension Library in Domino Designer 9

The main steps to install the XPages Extension Library in Domino Designer 9 are:

Download and extract the XPages Extension Library Update Site
Install the XPages Extension Library Plugin into Domino Designer from the Update Site folder
Install the XPages Extension Library Plugin into the built-in Domino server to support local preview (optional)

Note that the Instructions Below are Generic

The names of the actual files in the instructions below may not match the version of the Extension Library you are downloading. However, the steps to install the Extension Library are the same for all versions.

Step 1 - Download and Extract the XPages Extension Library Update Site

The releases of the XPages Extension Library are distributed/downloaded in a compressed zip file. This zip file contains other zip files to install the Extension Library on a Domino server or a Designer client or the Notes client (to support XPiNC applications).

Follow these steps to download and extract the XPages Extension Library to prepare for installation:

Go to the http://extlib.openntf.org/ site and select the Download/Release tab to access all of the available XPages Extension Library releases. Select the latest release from the table to match your release of Domino Designer (for example, if you are running Domino Designer release 9.0.0 choose the 900v00_03.20131001-1400 release that was made available on Oct 22, 2013). This image shows the selection of the latest release available at the time for Notes/Domino release 9.0.1. Click the zip file for the release to download.
Right-click on the downloaded zip file in the download folder and choose Extract All... from the context menu.
Choose a temporary folder location for the extraction. In this example the extracted folder will be placed under the C:\Temp folder).
Locate and open the extracted folder in the temporary location. This folder will contain license documents, NSF files for demonstrations and PDF slides and files. The updateSiteOpenNTF-designer.zip compressed zip file contains the update site and jar files to install the XPages Extension Library in Domino Designer as an OSGI plugin extension. The updateSiteOpenNTF.zip compressed zip file contains the update site and jar files to install the XPages Extension Library on a Domino server.

Right-click on the updateSiteOpenNTF-designer.zip zip file and choose Extract All... form the context menu. Choose a temporary folder location for the extraction (in this example C:\tempSites was chosen).
The site.xml file and the features and plugins folders (which contain the jar files) are extracted to the tempSites folder, in this example C:\tempSites\updateSiteOpenNTF-designer. This will be the location to specify the Update Site Folder for the next part of the installation procedure.

Step 2 - Install the XPages Extension Library Plugin into Domino Designer from the Update Site Folder

The library is provided as an Eclipse update site which should be installed using the Eclipse update manager.

In Domino Designer, choose File | Preferences from the menu to open the Preferences dialog.
Navigate to the Domino Designer page and check the 'Enable Eclipse plug-in install' option if not already selected. Save and close the Preferences.
Choose File | Application | Install... from the menu to open the Install/Update dialog shown below. Select the 'Search for new features to install' option and click [Next] to continue.
Click the [Add Folder Location...] button and then navigate to the location of the Update Site Folder (C:\tempSites\updateSiteOpenNTF-designer in this example).
Click [OK] in both the Browse For Folder dialog above and the Edit Local Site dialog shown below.
Click [Finish] to accept the specified application location and continue with the install.
Select the top/parent checkbox to select all features to install. Click [Next] to continue.
Choose to accept the feature license and click [Next] to continue.
Click [Finish] to initiate the install.
There will be a number of prompts to confirm the installation of unsigned plug-ins. Select 'Install this plug-in' for each and click [OK] to continue.
Once complete, restart the Designer and Notes clients.

Step 3 - Install the XPages Extension Library Plugin into the built-in Domino server to support local preview

At this stage, if you were to attempt to preview an XPage which uses extension library components you would get an "Unexpected runtime error". For example in the image below the exception states that the library com.ibm.xsp.extlibx.library, required by the application cannot be found. This is because the above procedure only installs the extension library in the Domino Designer client, not in the local preview (Domino server) engine.

To enable previewing extension library features in a browser, the files from features and plugins folders extracted from updateSiteOpenNTF-designer.zip must be copied/pasted to the following file location:

<Notes_Data_Directory>\domino\workspace\applications\eclipse

Follow these steps to enable the local previewing of extension library features in a web browser:

In the Windows file system, navigate to the <Notes_Data_Directory>\domino\workspace\applications\eclipse directory location. Note that the two sub-folders, features and plug-ins are currently empty.
Copy the extracted files from the features and plugins folders (done in the first procedure in this lesson), into their corresponding folder located under the Notes data directory structure specified above. In the image below, the files in the extracted features folder are being copied/pasted into the corresponding features folder in the Notes files structure. This will then be repeated for the files in the plugins folder.
Restart Notes and Designer.