Deploying the extension library - client edition

Unless you are living under an XRock your next XPages project will use the Extension Library. While installing it into your development environment is easy (just follow the instructions) and deployment to your 8.5.2 servers got a lot easier, deploying it to XPiNC application takes a few steps more:

1. You need an update site. Since you deployed it to the servers you would have one already
2. You need a Widget catalog (typically called toolbox.nsf). Luckily that's just a File - Application - New
3. You need an entry in the widget catalog for the extension library plug-in with a widget.xml describing the plug-in (details below)
4. You need a client policy that points all Notes clients to the Widget catalog and makes the category you assigned to the Extlib Widget an automatic mandatory install
5. Sit back and relax and see your extension library deployed

You can muse if you update site should use HTTP or NRPC. The later would have the advantage, that you can replicate the update site to your clients (using a policy) making the update process independent from actual network connections. The tricky part is to get the XML file right.The format of the XML file is partly documented in a DTD in the Expeditor documentation. If you are not familiar with DTD, they are a little hard to read and also kind of out of fashion. Today one would expect an XML Schema instead. At least it is very well documented. That part needs to be wrapped into a CDATA section and surrounded with the widget code. A sample can be found in the Domino administrator documentation. The file could look like this: Update: IdoNotes (Chris Miller) has a complete video walkthru of the process.
As usual YMMV