The other thing which we wanted this standard subform to do was act as a container for the "usual" action buttons that are normally placed directly onto a Notes form. This would eliminate the need for developers to have to add these buttons onto every form and the buttons would always act the same. The standard action buttons we came up with were Edit Document, Close Window, Save & Close, and Cancel.

Of course, the action buttons on our subform were written to make sure that they only displayed when they made sense ("Save & Close" is only available when the document is in edit mode, etc.).

Working with the developers on the team revealed a problem with this approach. There are applications that require special code to reside in these buttons to do things like perform workflow or restrict access to only certain individuals. We really wanted to keep the standard action button approach, so we added an additional field, shown in Figure B, to the base form: "ButtonsToHide". The ButtonsToHide field is a Text, Computed for display field which contains the names of the buttons which should be suppressed from displaying when the base form is rendered.

FIGURE B


Be sure to give your developers a way to suppress the display of the standard buttons. Roll over picture for a larger image.

With the standard subform in place, here's what our developers need to do in order to add a new form to any application:

1. Create a new form by choosing Design->Form from the Create menu.
2. Create the following Text, Computed for display fields at the very top of the form: FrmName, FrmLin2, FrmUpDate, ButtonsToHide.
3. Add the "StdFormHeader" subform.
4. Add the application specific fields for to the rest of the form.

Once all that's done, you're ready to include the new standard header in your forms, as shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C


Here's the StdFormHeader subform in use on a form. Roll over picture for a larger image.

What did this very simple bit of coding do for us? It has standardized the top of our forms and ensured that all form action buttons work the same way. Users like it because they know ahead of time how a form will look and developers like it because it reduces the amount of drudge work which they have to do on forms. It also allows newly hired developers to be sure that they're producing comparable interfaces to those created by our more experienced developers.