#lotusscript

Here's a little trick I've been doing for a while now. Often to carry out system support I'll need to check the value of a field that is hidden from the user interface. There is the old faithful Document Properties dialog box, but it is a little fiddly, tiny text and viewable area and little scroll buttons.

So now I do this. I have my system fields at the top of a form. I lay them out in a table, label them and add any context I need, and then group them together in ways that makes sense for their functional use. By default this top of the form is hidden, but a I have a form action (displayed only for an administration role) that toggles the section open and closed. You can see the form action in the far right of the button bar, its just an icon with some arrows.

The hidden fields section in its default closed state.

The open hidden fields section.

The code to do this is pretty basic. There's a number field hidden above the tables of system fields. It defaults to 1 (which is @True). It is also reset to a value of 1 on QueryOpen.

Call source.Document.ReplaceItemValue("HideAdvanced", 1)

The hidden fields section in design mode.

The buttons with the expander icons (the arrows down and arrows up) are then set to hide based on the value of HideAdvanced, the field. I also have a check for a user role @Contains(@UserRoles; "SystemAdmin"). The buttons simply hide or show the table by changing the value of the HideAdvanced field and then refeshing the document.

A quick note about error handling. I use Julian Robichaux's OpenLog for pretty much all my error handling.

http://www.openntf.org/internal/home.nsf/project.xsp?action=openDocument&name=OpenLog

One of my standards is to CAPITALISE anything I declare globally. I also use underscore_separation rather than CamelCasing for global variables. It helps make them stand out in code on a first glance.

Another standard I have around global variables is to be a little picky about where I declare them. My general preference is to have a LotusScript library to hold them that included just about everywhere, but some are so specific in scope that I might just store them with in a library or agent.

I will often use global constants in place of checking for aliased integers from forms or CGI actions. Consider a radio button set that has a friendly text for users but returns 0, 1, 2 or 3. I would consider setting up some constant string with names that imply the values of the radio options. For example I would set up Const OPTION_UPDATE$=”1” and be checking for a value of OPTION_UPDATE in code for the radio option “Update all actions with this new value|1”. In a URL QueryString I often have an action value to determine what should happen in an open or save event. Again here I would have Global Constants with meaningful variable names. Things like ACTION_NO_SAVE or ACTION_UPDATE_ALL tell the whole story, it’s still important to comment sections of code of course, but a meaningful name goes a long way.

I always want to have fairly universal code for UI initiated events wherever they fired from, it just makes things a bit easier most of the time. I especially like selection code that handles just an active document in a view, without the entry needing to be ticked. It makes sense to me that if I've clicked on an entry I should be able to do something with it without needing to tick again. Users are quite often confused by this also.

This is what I use most of the time. A user clicks on a button somewhere (or selects an agent from the actions menu) in an action bar on a document or similar form action, or in a view action - either if a document is active in the view or if more than one document is checked in the view. 

Dim session As New NotesSession Dim workspace As New NotesUIWorkspace Dim colSelected As NotesDocumentCollection Dim docCurrent As NotesDocument Dim bMulti As Boolean 'determine if single doc or multiple docs are selected in a view or if UI doc is open If workspace.CurrentView Is Nothing Then  'if there is no view then access the backend doc thru the uidoc  Set docCurrent = workspace.CurrentDocument.Document Else  'more than one doc may be selected if there is a view  If workspace.CurrentView.Documents.Count > 0 Then    Set colSelected = workspace.CurrentView.Documents    Set docCurrent = colSelected.GetFirstDocument    bMulti = True   Else>    Set docCurrent = session.DocumentContext   End If End If

From here I go and run the main bit of my code: