Had some fun this weekend messing about with Ext and making a start on DExt — my Domino framework that builds upon it.

I know I'm banging on about Ext lately, but, even if you couldn't care less, this is worth the read as it's useful outside the Ext framework as well.

Take another look at the DExt app . Notice there are now two drop-down menus on the top left. One called Create the other called Options. Create is disabled and greyed-out. The Options menu has a login item, which displays a login dialog box. Login as "Dext" (a real registered Domino user) and you'll see the create menu enables and the Login menu item becomes Logout.

How does it do this? Well, we could easily do it server side in a normal HTML-based app, but the UI in Ext is built client-side at "run time". Because of this our JavaScript needs to know all about the user's session.

To create an equivalent of a NotesSession in JavaScript I created a Form and called it dext.js. This form contains nothing but JavaScript and creates the DEXT object which contains a load of properties of the current session. It's added to the page using a ?ReadForm request as its content-type won't allow it be edited.

<script src="dext/dext.js?ReadForm" type="text/javascript"></script>

You can see the contents here (switch to Firefox first! IE won't open it). With this code available we can now do lots of stuff in our code, such as:

Ext.MessageBox.show({
        title: 'About You',
        msg: "Your name is "+DEXT.Session.User.Name["Common"]

or

toolbar.add({
        cls: 'x-btn-text-icon bmenu',
        text:'Create',
        disabled: !DEXT.Session.User.Access.CanCreateDocuments

Earlier I made out that you had to be logged in to see the create menu. As you can see from the code above this isn't strictly true. If Anonymous had create document rights in the ACL the menu would be enabled. Although if you wanted the former to be true you could change it to:

toolbar.add({
        cls: 'x-btn-text-icon bmenu',
        text:'Create',
        disabled: !DEXT.Session.User.Authenticated

The DEXT.Session class also contains a couple of methods: login and logout. The login method builds the login from scratch. Part of the code to this is:

{tag:'input', type:'hidden', name:'redirectto', value:DEXT.Database.Path}

Notice we've passed the database's path to the RedirectTo field to make sure this is where we come back to.

There's more you can do with it but I think this proves the point.

As I mentioned earlier you don't need to be using Ext to use a "Domino" JavaScript object that contains invaluable information about the user, current session and database. You could add a similar form to any database and make use of it.