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More Nested IBM XPage Panels + viewPanel Controls in viewColumns (with an online demo: XBook)
10/28/2011 02:08 PM by Chris Toohey
Sometimes I like to play with a given technique to see how far I can take it.
Thus said, I thought I'd mess around with the techniques discussed in Inline Buttons for XPage View Controls, Nested XPage viewPanels in viewColumns (with meme-themed demo), and IBM XPages + Google Maps Mashup (or Surfacing traditional Views as NotesViewEntryCollections with a viewPanel Control), and see just how far I could take them.
I'll admit, I didn't go that far - mostly because it got to the point where I confirmed my theories: it works, and works really well.
My playground was a simple NotesDatabase that contains no Form Design Elements, only 2 View Design Elements (used for NotesViewEntryCollection sorting more than anything...), and uses only core XPage controls.
(I originally used the OpenNTF.org Extension Library dialog Control for the Status Update form -- in fact, you can see it in the banner image in this article -- but decided just now [midway through writing this article] that it's a better showcase using only the core XPage controls.)
Since each panel Control can have it's own unqiue data source, and a viewColumn control can house literally anything -- including, of course, a panel Control -- I thought that I'd create a Facebook-esque demo application that showed off the technique.
Here's a quick visual overview of what the architecture of the "XBooks" demo: