I’m stuck. The books I have (the “Bible” and Lotus Notes Developer’s Toolbox) all seem to be about pointing and clicking. I’m used to Active Server Pages and php. I’m having trouble getting comfortable with all this pointing and clicking in the designer. I came to this forum and it doesn’t seem like you guys point and click–it seems like you have a much stronger grasp of what’s going on and how to write stuff yourself. Please help me bridge the gap. I’ve been doing web development for 7 years and I feel like a complete neophyte. Is there some resource–some article somewhere that will clear things up for me?
In general, there’s no magic to this kind of stuff in Domino. With few exceptions.
If the documents displayed in a different view all seem to obey a target of _blank, but you don’t see that in the HTML that is send to the browser, the reason could be a property of the form, that is used to show those documents. There is a form feature called auto-framing which could cause just this behavior.
Most people however do generate the links themselves, if they need something similar. That means, they create a column formula, that returns the required HTML as so called “pass-through HTML”. To do that, you would include the column formula in square brackets. This indicates to Domino, that the text is HTML already and no further processing is required.
There’s one little catch to make it work: There is a column property, that determines, if a column value should be converted into a link automatically. But even if it is set for none of the columns, Domino will still do that for the very first column. Only if you first check that property box, save the view and then uncheck the property again, Domino will stop generating its own link automatically.