Finally, a Domino 6 tip - get yourself the CodeStore Designer page
Earlier this week, Jim Gooch of Double 6, let me in on a Domino 6 tip. In his words:
I have a tip - or at least what I believe to be an undocumented feature of R6 discovered by accident.
When he says by accident what he means is that he went hacking at the Designer client and discovered something useful for us all. It took me a while to understand what he meant, but I think it's worth passing on. Now, not being a big user of the client I had never bothered to customise my Welcome Page. Had I done so, I might have noticed the Links section, as below:
The bevelled box in this section is an area that you can drag and drop almost anything to. The result is a link to that resource - be it an image, a URL, a program or even a database.
What Jim noticed is that this type of control does not appear anywhere in Designer as an option for adding to our forms. So he set about trying to hack his way in to it. If you want to add this special outline to your own form - and here's the clever bit - double-click the welcome page in the client, putting it in to edit mode, select the Links outline and copy it, switch to your form in Designer and paste it in. You now have a Links section in your own form.
Obviously, this is Client only and not much use to me personally. So, to try and demonstrate its use to us all I made something I think we can all appreciate - a customised Designer Welcome Page. As below:
What use is it? Well, at lot more use that the Tools menu that Lotus added in R6. You can add anything you like to this area. There's also a link to your favourite website. See if you can guess where. If you want to try the Links Outline out without messing with the client welcome page, download this database. In it there's one form called "DesignerWelcomePage". This contains the Links Outline that you can copy and paste to other forms as much as you like. If you want you can even make this form your Designer welcome page. Just use it to replace the "DesignerWelcomePage" form in your local Bookmark.nsf database. Et voila.
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He's baaaaaaaaack!
*This* will be very useful for me, so thanks Jake and thanks Double6.
-Chris
The real business is when you show it to the world, not when you just do it to yourself.
I did the same with my Designer Welcome page 2 years ago :-(
.::AleX::.
Dominocode.Net
Hey Alex,
You mean that you had the same drag-and-drop management features etc. 2 years ago?
I totally agree with the "real business" comment - in fact, I see several "applications" where this can come in handy; from Custom "Welcome" Pages to Knowledgebases. (IMHO)
While it's certainly not the "greatest find in the world", it definately does two things:
1 - gives us a quick "tool" to add to an application
2 - (and more importantly) makes you want to find out what else is in the Clients that's not documented!
-Chris
I have a few more undocumented client side thingy's that make it possible to design a corporate alternative to bookmark.nsf in R6 that includes embedded elements from any db on the user's server.
All because a client asked for a launcher page to specific views in a db but also added that he wanted the inbox and a preview pane. I cursed at the time :-)
Small (Domino) World, as they say. Mr Gooch's partner in crime Mr Byrne taught me Lotus Notes. I was a Support Analyst before my then boss brought him in for consultancy etc. I didn't know you were all aquainted.
Tone - I'll send him your regards Mr Walters (we are nor aquianted except by the Domino world.)
I tried this. I pasted from the zip file the UserBookmarkOrder. It works fine on my machine, but not on other users. What am I doing wrong?