While we're talking about FCKeditor and Domino...

05/23/2007 10:09 PM by Chris Toohey

I've found it's ultimately easier to take Domino out of the markup-generation whenever I can, and that means creating your own markup - or at least creating and controlling your own markup-generation. The first step is to often create your own Domino Forms - markup-based forms that are used to create documents in a Domino database.

"Rolling your own" Domino Forms can be pretty easy, once you know how that is. One of the tricks I've learned can help to cut down on calculations, thus providing faster page loads and less impact at the server, and allow a more easily recognizable home-grown solution. I'll elaborate on what I have (and what I've seen other developers) do in the past:

Let's say we have a form called "testform" that we will use to create documents in our database. "Testform" contains 3 fields, testfield1, testfield2, and testfield3. Now, there's two ways that I've seen this done: either the first line on the "testform" form is </form> -or- first setting the Form's Content Type to HTML (or Other, "text/html"), putting all of the fields at the top of the form (with hide-when formulas) and using hand-written markup with <Computed Text>. This second approach gives you the added benefit of being able to manipulate ANYTHING on the given form, since it's all hand-written by the developer.

Since I think we're all familiar with the first option, I'll go on a little more about the second:

From the above example, you can see what I'm getting at - I calculate the the value of the field from it's correlating Domino-based field value. But instead of using <Computed Text> for 50 fields, you can simply use the Domino field in the <Computed Text>'s place...

This works great non-Radio or non-Checkbox Input elements and Textarea elements. For those and other types of elements, check back here soon!

Some quick reads for related content:
Creating Documents via the URL-Command Method