Search This Blog

Friday, January 11, 2013

Nice trick for UI: consume LN Powa

Hello

Let's imagine that you have a CRM application based on Lotus Notes.
Usually in such applications you have Company and related Contacts documents.

You want to get next kind of UI


Actually, the goal of my post is to show you the easiest way of such UI implementation but I let myself to say a few words about why we could need such UI.

Well, usually, Company form is overloaded with different kind of data. Company document may give you information about correspondence, activities (meetings, tasks, ...), opportunities, sales, contacts and so on and so forth. Obviously, such kind of documents act slow and are quite big in any context.

Usually, people do not need all that information at once. In the most of cases you work only with contacts.
So, it would be nice to have some UI that allows user to get the most frequently used Company information.
In our scenario we achieve this goal with UI mentioned above.

So, let's go to implementation.

1) We need frameset with at least two frames.


I omit all these things about frame properties (name, target..) since there is nothing special there

2) We need a custom form with any logic and UI that we need for the right frame, when Company document is selected (not double clicked) in the left frame



3) We need a NotesView with Companies. This is the main part of this solution.

We need to handle two things with this view:

  • Form Formula - allows us to define custom form that will open in the right frame when user selects Company in the left frame
  • Queryopendocument - allows us to open a Company document with its original form in a new window when user makes double click on the document. I found only one way how to override FormFormula property: via opening NotesDocument by URL. 


That's it.
Now:
  • one click on Company  - we get Contacts list in the right frame
  • double click on Company - we get a full Company document in a new window



No comments:

Post a Comment