Custom controls in Domino® Designer

With this release of Domino® Designer you can create custom controls for your applications. A custom control is a collection of controls that are stored as a single object. Similar to Domino® Designer subforms, custom controls are design elements that you can create once and add to multiple pages. When you update a custom control, every page that uses that custom control automatically gets updated with the changes. This saves you design time because you do not have to update each page separately.

Common uses of custom controls include adding a company logo to business documents or adding mailing label information to mail and memo pages. A custom control can be a permanent part of a page or can appear conditionally, depending on the result of a formula. For example, you might offer users a choice of custom mail pages with different graphics and styles for various types of mail messages, such as memos, alerts, or letters.

In addition to reusing custom controls across multiple pages and managing updates in a single place, you can also add editable areas to custom controls and organize custom controls in the Controls palette for easy access. By default, custom controls are stored as XSP and XSP-CONFIG files in your Eclipse workspace.

For more complete information on how custom controls are used in this release of Domino® Designer, refer to the Domino® Designer Xpages User Guide help plugin that ships with this product. To access this information, select Help-Help Contents from the Domino® Designer menu to launch the Eclipse Help System. Plugins are accessed from the left-hand Contents panel.