Creating Outlines

By Steve Kern

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Creating an Outline
• Working with Outline Entries
• Embedding Outlines
• Adding an Outline to a Frameset

Outlines were added in R5 and provide navigation for sites and databases. Outlines are similar to navigators, image maps, and folder panes. Like the table of contents for this book, an outline is an element of the UI that not only indicates the various parts of an application or site, but also provides links to those parts . Outlines can contain links to views, forms, framesets, other site databases, and so on. Outlines perform equally well in Web clients as they do in Notes clients .

NOTE

In R5, outlines were located at the top level of the Design tile. In Notes and Domino 6, they have been moved under Shared Code.

 

In R4, you could embed a folder pane in a document or form, but the graphic and text elements were fixed. The only way to add graphics or change the text in R4 was to create navigators. In R4, you needed multiple navigators to create a hierarchical effect because a navigator has a fixed graphic content. Whenever you wanted to open a new element in a navigator, you had to open a new navigator with a different graphic image.

In an outline, you can add graphics to an entry and even change the name . Outlines can be hierarchical, like a view, and entries can be expanded and collapsed much like a view category. An outline can be embedded as an applet in a page or a form, and multiple outlines can exist in the same database, adding additional flexibility. The choice of design elements to navigate sites and databases is obvious, given the power and flexibility of an outline compared to a navigator.

An outline consists of one or more entries. Each entry in the outline can link to a database object or a URL, or it can run an action programmed in the Formula language. After you have created an outline, you can use it by embedding it in a form, page, or document. Perhaps the most common use is in a page. In fact, if you click the Use Outline button in the Work pane, Domino Designer creates a page for you. After the element is embedded in a page, you can control various display elements. This is discussed in the later section, "Embedding Outlines." Now that the outline is in a page, you can present it to the user by putting the page into a frameset.

NOTE

For more information about pages, see Chapter 8, "Using the Page Designer." For more information about framesets, see Chapter 10, "Adding Framesets to Domino Application."