Tips Week 2.3 - Using Pages for Special Forms
Note to self: If you're going to start a week of tips, make sure you have at least five decent tips.
I know they're not exactly ground-breaking, but you never know who will find what useful. These tips are just things I've had in my Action Outline file for ages. It's like a massive notepad come clipboard and it's got all sorts of stuff in there. I've been having a clear out of late. Hence "tips week".
Anyway, on to today's tip, which is ridiculously simple - did you know the $$ReturnGeneralError "form" can in fact be a Page? Same goes (I think) for other things like document deleted forms and view templates. Obviously, you can't have fields on them, so this tip is in fact fairly useless. Oh well.
Hardly useless.
You can include computed text on pages, which means they can be used for all kinds of goodness. You can even have them display the doctype you like. :-)
Any time I have a need for an html form that won't work (play nice) with a Domino form, I use a page and hand code the markup. You loose some RAD speed, but gain a degree of control.
Funny. The only pages I ever use in my applications tend to be named pgBlank or pgEmpty. Who's able to guess what they are used for?
In fact, almost always when I started to use a page in some projekt, sooner or later came the point where I finally did need a real field. For me, forms treated as HTML (possibly available to public access users) are the better choice, even if I don't want Domino's code generated.
Preferences do differ, obviously.