Book Image

IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques

By : Richard G Ellis
Book Image

IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques

By: Richard G Ellis

Overview of this book

Domino is an application server that can be used as a standalone web server. As part of the Domino suite, it provides a powerful collaborative platform for the development of customized business applications. It provides enterprise-grade e-mail, messaging, and scheduling capabilities. There are many novice and moderately experienced developers who would like to enhance a Web-enabled Domino application, but to do so they need to learn the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and also how to use those technologies in the context of a Domino application. Information about how to do this is available on the Web, but the sheer volume of that information makes it very difficult for the newbie to get started. Topics and techniques presented in this book provide a comprehensive overview of all major design strategies used to Web-enable traditional Domino applications. Illustrations provide clear working examples of how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript can be incorporated into existing applications to improve both look and performance. Early chapters provide suggestions for working with users and for managing your development time and effort. Later chapters focus in detail on forms and pages, views, navigation, agents, security, performance, and troubleshooting. Examples demonstrate clearly how to incorporate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into Domino designs. By the end of this book you will have learned what you need to know to quickly and competently tackle web application enhancement tasks. Beyond providing a good understanding, this book will continue to serve as a valuable source of ideas and techniques. This book brings together essential classic strategies and techniques used to deploy Domino applications to the Web. Chapters cover all major design elements, with a special emphasis on how to craft these elements to work well with web browsers. Many topics include alternative techniques for solving particular problems. Illustrations and examples can be used where appropriate, or they can serve as jumping off points for your own solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
IBM Lotus Domino: Classic Web Application Development Techniques
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
10
Testing and Debugging

Locating style rules in applications


CSS rules can be coded in many places within an application, and in some ways that is unfortunate. Several CSS rules that define the same property can be targeted to the same design element; the browser figures out which rule applies and then renders the element accordingly. If an element is not styling the way you expect it to, you may have to look in several places to find the rogue rule. You will find CSS easier to work with if you co-locate all rules in the same place.

The following topics illustrate several ways in which CSS rules can be inserted into forms and pages.

Use a page design element

A page design element can be used to store CSS rules. Create the page and use Designer to edit the rules. The page name can be anything you like, but it is well to name the page in a way that identifies it as containing CSS rules, as in this example:

Web Sandbox 05 CSS | websandbox05.css

It is critical to identify the content type of the page as text/css on...