To further help the Notes user, I added a column that displays an icon indicating what kind of link the menu item is. If it is just a Notes link, they'll just see an icon of a document. If it's a URL link, they see an icon of a globe indicating it will open a link on the Web. Once users get savvy to this they can prevent the annoyance that is caused when trying to open a link to a Web page when they are not connected to the Web. The final result of all of this can be seen in Figure D.

FIGURE D


Here is how the menu of links looks to the Notes user when displayed in conjunction with a navigator. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The obligatory caveats
No Domino article would be complete without a couple of caveats, and here they are:

When you reorder the Menu Heading Items, you need to re-calculate the formulas on all of the documents created with the Menu Item Form (or Menu Item URL Form) that are affected. I have a button on the Notes view that I use to manage the link that opens a document, puts it in edit mode and then closes it, thereby recalculating all of the formulas. I just cycle through the menu when I need to recalculate the formulas. Or you could write a LotusScript agent to recalculate the formulas on the back end. (If you do, please send me a copy at dan.velasco@adecco.com).

You can't use this system in 4.5 to insert the menu on a $$ViewTemplate form that already has a $$ViewBody field. This may be possible in 4.6 but some of us are still using 4.5. An alternative is to open up a page that is using the menu, view the source and cut out the section containing the menu code. You can then put this in a subform and insert it in a form to imitate the look and feel of the main view. Its usefulness, of course, will depend on how diligent you are about updating it to match the changes in the dynamic view. This is a kludge, but a kludge with good-looking results. The other alternative is just to decide to have another menu for views that is either hard-coded or gets it's value from an @DbColumn formula or the like.

The twisties can be made to disappear if you are using version 4.6. All you need to do is to choose to have the view treated as HTML on the View Properties tab.

Think of the possibilities
There are many other possibilities for improving on this Menu Management System and making it even more robust. Here are three that come to mind:

• Make an image for each menu item and change the last view column formula to display the image of the menu item and not just the name of the menu item.

• When the menu is inserted into the frame, you can add a drop-down menu feature. This allows you to select a subset of the links (such as the most frequently visited links) using an @DbColumn formula and include them in a drop-down menu. Then the user only needs to click on a submit button labeled "Go!" and it will transfer them to that page (or open it in the target frame) by using a $$Return field to calculate where to direct them. See the $$ViewTemplate for WebMenuView form in the database for more details.