August 23rd, 2005
Folder Of Design Elements
While most of my blog entries explain features
of Lotus Notes everyone can use, today I am going to take a slight detour
and explain a little known feature of Domino Designer for those of you
that do application development.
By default, Designer groups elements
together by their respective types, such as Framesets, Pages, Forms, Views,
etc. and lists them alphabetically inside those groups. Did you know
that you can put different types of design elements into your own custom
folders, allowing you to organize and access items however you would like?
For example, in most of my applications
I provide users navigation to multiple views via an outline. That
outline is embedded into a page. That page is displayed in a frame
in a frameset. I like to group these elements together so that I
can quickly access them:
Below are the steps to do this:
1. Click on the "New Folder"
icon, enter a name for the folder, and select the root of the "Folders"
tree. This will create a new empty folder on the Designer Bookmark
Bar (the far left side of the Designer UI)
2. Drag and drop your database's bookmark
into the new folder:
Alternate Tip: If
you would like you can skip step #1, and instead just drag your database's
bookmark directly onto the Bookmark bar itself, and not have it located
inside a folder.
3. Click the "New Folder"
icon again, enter a name, but this time make sure to select the database
bookmark from step #2 as the location for the new folder:
4. Now you can drag and drop design
elements into the folder you created in step #3.
The custom folders you create on Designer's
Bookmark bar can contain multiple databases. For example, a certain
project you are working on may involve multiple databases, and grouping
them together may help you be better organized. Similarly, you may
be working on multiple projects, or working for multiple clients, and using
customized folders for each may make it much easier for you to find what
you need versus just using the default "Recent Databases" folder.
A database's bookmark can contain multiple
custom folders. You can even have folders inside other folders. This
should enable you to organize design elements in whatever way you find
most useful.
I have noticed some limitations.
First, you can drag and drop the elements from either the Design Pane or
from a Window Tab, but not from the lists shown in the Work Pane. Also,
I don't think you can drag and drop multiple elements at once. If
anyone knows ways around these two limitations, please let me know.
