Exam 190-513: Using JavaScript in Domino R5 Applications

Jake Howlett, 21 Febraury 2001

Category: Miscellaneous; Keywords: JavaScript exam

Yep, you guessed it; Yesterday I did the JavaScript exam. Why am I telling you, you may well ask? Well, firstly to show-off (I got 94%) and secondly to let you know what it was like and some of the "trickier" questions asked.

I have to admit that I went in to the exam brimming with confidence, there's not much I don't know about JavaScript ;-) This confidence was probably brought on because I had forgotten how badly those damn questions are worded. I got to the end only half as confident of passing as when I walked in. Most questions are of the type where it could be A or it could be B, depending how you read it. Luckily I've done enough Lotus exams to know what they are getting at.

In general most of the questions asked are a push-over for anybody familiar with JavaScript. There are lots that are simply checking you know that JS is case sensitive, along the lines of:

Q. Which of these will properly access the value of a field called "City" on the form on a page:

  1. document.Forms[0].City.value
  2. document.forms[0].City.value
  3. document.orm.City.value
  4. Some other silly suggestion

There are also a few that test whether or not you know the difference between "=" and "==". For example:

Q. In the following code the alert box always appears, which line will fix this?
var city = document.forms[0].City;
if (city.value = "London")
{
alert("I am in London")
}
  1. if (city.text = "London")
  2. if (city.value == "London")
  3. if (city == "London")
  4. if (city = "London")
Other topics are more varied. Here is a selection of those worth a mention. I think the bit I fowled up on was variables (I got 100% in "Use JavaScript" section and 89% in "Code JavaScript" section) probably because they talk about JavaScript as Netscape expect it to be, where as I am used to desiging for IE's more friendly implementaion.

Q. How are variables typed and declared in JavaScript?
  1. Explicitly declared, Loosely typed
  2. Implicitly declared, Loosely typed
  3. Explicitly declared, Strongly typed
  4. Implicitly declared, Strongly typed
Q. Which of these best describes the Location object?
  1. Contains the URL of a hypertext link
  2. Contained by the history object
  3. Contained by the document object
  4. Contains the URL of the current doc
Q. A variable is defined like below. What is x ?
var x = document.forms[0];
  1. The form object of the current page
  2. A document object with a form referrer
  3. Silly
  4. Silly
Q. Look at the following function.
function clickButton(){
document.forms[0].submitMe.onClick();
}
What does it do?
  1. Runs a global JS function called onClick()
  2. Runs onClick event of the onSubmit object
  3. Runs a JS function called onClick that is on a form object called submitMe
  4. Obviously wrong
Q. What does the following code do?
onClick = "submitMe(this.form);"
  1. Call the function and pass form object of current page
  2. Call the function and pass form object of the current button object
  3. Wrong
  4. Wrong
Q. Which is true of the history object?
  1. Belongs to window object
  2. Belongs to document object
  3. Belongs to location object
  4. Silly answer
Other topics covered are Moral - whilst it is easy for me to say that is was easy, I have to admit, you really do need a solid understanding of JavaScript, not just in use with Domino.

If you do the exam then good luck. It's worth it alone just to put it on the resumé.......