The Domino 4.x login dialog box has only two fields: login and password. This is illustrated in Figure A.

FIGURE A

The Domino 4.x login dialog box only has Login and Password fields.

In most cases, users are confused about the variety of passwords they have to use. In many company environments, there's a Novell password, an Internet-proxy password, a Notes password, and now the Domino password. Of course, users have to remember their related login names as well.

To help ease the confusion, I created a login dialog box that can be customized. Figure B shows how it looks in my sample database. My sample database can be found at http://www.best.com/~cseh/logindb/logindb.zip.

FIGURE B


Here's what the login box looks like in my sample database. Roll over picture for a larger image.

The concept of the enhanced login dialog box is based on collecting the user name and password in a free-style form, then forcing the login by issuing this command:

For a quick login, you can use the following format (but only with 4.x or 5.x browsers):

Although not strictly relevant to this article, the loginname:password form is also usable for accessing FTP servers. You can use this format to log into an FTP site quickly:

It also works with 3x type of browsers.

Once again, here's the full command line:

The formula will do a quick login. Then, to avoid seeing the password in the URL window, the formula opens a temporary form -- the TransferForm. This form immediately replaces the URL in the history buffer.

The TransferForm has one computed-for-display field, the $$HTMLHead field. It has a small JavaScript code to replace the URL with a new location, which is shown below:

Next, I'd like to point out how to test and implement this database before encoding it in a production database. You should download the sample database, unzip it, and place the LOGINDB1.NSF file in the \NOTES\LOGINDB\ directory.