Understanding the Action Pane

The Action pane is a little different from the other panes in the Design area. The pane itself has no properties. However, the Action bar and the action itself have properties. The Action pane contains a list of available actions. In R5, the actions were inserted automatically and could not be removed. In Designer 6, you must explicitly insert the system actions from the menu by selecting Create, Action, Insert System Action. You can also remove the system actions from the Action pane. Six system actions are common to forms, subforms, views, and folders; these are visible in the Action pane, as shown in Figure 3.18.

Figure 3.18. The system actions for both forms and views are shown in the Action pane in the upper right.

The available system actions are listed here:

• Categorize
• Edit Document
• Send Document
• Forward
• Move to Folder
• Remove from Folder

System actions are automatically included on the Action menu, but not in the Action bar. You can change this behavior by checking two display options on the Action properties box:

Include Action in Action Menu

Include Action in Button Bar

CAUTION

System actions do not work for Web browsers. If you want to use any of the functionality of the system actions on the Web, you must create a new custom action that duplicates the command. Simple actions are also unusable on the Web.

 

You can also program action buttons with simple actions. After creating a new action, select Simple Action(s) from the Run field. Simple actions are available only for Notes clients . Clicking the Add Action button launches the Add Action dialog box, shown in Figure 3.19. You can string multiple simple actions together instead of writing a formula. Unfortunately, as with system actions, simple actions do not work on the Web ”in fact, once you've chosen Web in the Run field, Simple Action(s) is no longer available as a choice.

Figure 3.19. The Delete Document action is programmed with the Delete from Database simple action.