Is there any way to dynamicly create designelements in Notes as fields, buttons, etc. - like in a webpage?
In my mind one of the mayor drawbacks of most development tools is that you are restricted by what design elements you put in a form (when in Notes) - in my particular case i have a dialog box containing a search form, where the users can search for documents in some archive databases.
Right now the resulting list is shown in a RichTextItem, containing a doclink and a brief description. I want to add to this list the possibility to delete documents. If its a button, a link or a checkbox doesn’t matter. What matter is that i can insert an unknown number of fields, so have do i do that?
I have played with the idea to create a XML document, where i can define the fields / buttons and then import it to Notes, but im not sure how to do this…
Any help or ideas on how to make Notes more dynamic is most welcome.
You have basically three options: C API, DXL or third party product. The C API is very complex, and the design element creation is not particularly well documented, so I’d skip that if I were you. The DXL approach is very powerful, and will require a certain degree of ramp up time as you create design elements, look at what was created and then reproduce the process yourself. It may require some degree of comfort with XML processing, but the parser and all are at lest built into Notes now. This might be the right approach, depending on whether you have more time or more money. The third party approach is another possibility, about which I am biased, as one of the two tools that I know of you can use is our Midas Rich Text LSX, which lets you create design elements, manipulate fields, etc. very simply from LotusScript. The other product which I think would also allow dynamic design elements would be TeamStudio Configurator (somewhere at http://www.teamstudio.com, I would presume. I know much less about that TeamStudio’ product, except that their general focus is designers creating a design, whereas Midas is more often used as part of a script to do other things, since it is easier to integrate into the flow of your applications. Obviously, I like the third party approach, but I hope this at least gives you a set of choices or directions to examine.
It is easier to display the document descriptions in a listbox, and provide buttons that open or delete the selected document. It is the same kind of interface that you see in a database’s ACL window.