Forms 'n' Views

Mon Sep 10 19:33:03 EDT 2012

One of my (many) for-fun projects lately has been a design-element editor named "Forms 'n' Views". Though it's not really release-quality, it's been coming together enough to toss it up on GitHub and make a post about it. Basically, it's meant to serve a couple purposes:

  • Help mitigate the "Windows problem" - when all you want to do is make a quick change to a legacy design element (say, a stylesheet), but doing so would mean firing up a Windows VM, launching Designer, and opening the DB. For quick edits, the amount of time that takes wildly eclipses (heh) the time spent actually coding.
  • Experiment with a data-focused way to edit forms and views. The legacy editors are geared towards a Notes client target, dedicating most of their space to aspects that have no meaning when the design element is intended just for backing an XPage.
  • Eventually, provide a way to grant "sudo"-style access to other users to modify certain design elements without granting full designer/manager access, setting up WebDAV, or exposing a poor web designer to Designer.
  • Let me experiment with a different setup for an XPages app - Forms 'n' Views consists of a Dojo BorderContainer- and TabContainer-based UI on a single XPage, which loads up tabs containing custom controls on the fly. None of it is unexplored territory, but it's good to write different kinds of apps sometimes.
  • Let me try out some more backing-class architectures. Each editor is backed by a DOM representation of the exported DXL, which is manipulated through wrapper classes and then re-imported back directly. Things like getting lists of columns are done via XPath queries without storing the data redundantly.

In its current incarnation, it's taken on the pale complexion of Dojo's "claro" theme - I've been going back and forth between that and the Notes-like "soria" theme:

Forms 'n' Views

It should do for now, but I'll likely fiddle with it more to make it look better.

In any event, this has been a fun project so far, and hopefully it'll shape up into a useful tool.

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Thomas Adrian - Tue Sep 11 03:42:42 EDT 2012

this looks really nice. good job!

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Patrick Kwinten - Mon Nov 12 02:50:02 EST 2012

power to the power-user!

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