Trumping my co-presenter
Chris Blatnick discusses using table borders to mimic OS-style field controls in Notes. This is actually an old technique that I remember someone documenting on the BP forum back in the v3 days. Very cool stuff, and it's nice to see Chris come up with the same solution.
I was going to reply that I was disappointed that IBM didn't simply give us a border control on fields, but then it occured to me that you DO get border controls on text paragraphs, so if you're already separating your fields with paragraph controls, you can skip all the table cell generation and just use the text border controls instead.
This has an added bonus: it's a spectacular way to separate individual fields at PIXEL LEVEL. Click to check it out.
| Here's an example of what
the result is. There's a couple of nice advantages to the table cell
controls.
1) I don't need individual rows for the field controls. Just individual paragraphs. 2) I can use the border OUTSIDE controls to adjust spacing above and below the fields IN PIXELS!!! Using tables you have to set up individual tables or separator rows. 3) I can use the border INSIDE controls to adjust spacing to the left and right inside the "virtual field border" IN PIXELS. You can do this with the table controls, but it's a bigger pain. At the bottom, you can see a native time/date control with the field's borders set to none. We get the click-control inside the border, which is just fine with me. I right-aligned it 'cause I think that looks cool.  |
Things get interesting when you use this technique for a rich text control. The RT field inherits the border controls automatically. This might sound bad, but I'm not sure it is. It's a really interesting effect when you, say, just set the bottom border. Every paragraph gets an underline for the paragraph itself, which I bet could be really useful in some "dynamic table" purpose in a form.
I tried to use the rounded corner image technique for this, but "this property cannot be applied to a paragraph." *sigh* I doubt this is remedied in Notes 8, but I'll check tonight.
Comments
I am curious to here what you mean when the image property does not work? It seems to work for me.
Posted by Richard Moy At 10:17:31 PM On 12/21/2006 |
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 03:15:11 PM On 12/21/2006 |
Posted by Chris Blatnick At 11:00:41 PM On 12/21/2006 |
Posted by Chris Blatnick At 02:47:34 PM On 12/21/2006 |