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XPages Site Finder tutorial

This tutorial demonstrates the ease with which you can create a Web application in IBM® Domino® Designer using XPage elements. Using this tutorial you create and preview three XPages. You place controls on the XPages for accessing and viewing data, navigating to other pages, refreshing the same page, and performing other actions. You will even use JavaScript™.

Familiarity with Domino Designer and traditional design elements is helpful but not essential. A few design elements and graphics that are outside the scope of what you are learning are preloaded. For those that are new to Eclipse, Navigation in Domino Designer provides a good introduction.

The demo application, called Site Finder Demo, is an advanced template delivered with Domino Designer. It is like the tool on many Web sites to find a nearby location. You submit a zip code or address and the server returns matching locations. In this tutorial, you develop the Web page for making the submission, and other pages for creating and editing the site documents.

For simplicity reasons, access is not restricted. Anyone can create and edit documents. This access lets you preview the XPage features without having to set up a server. For a real application, you want to restrict access, which is easily done through an access control list (ACL). From the menu, click File > Application > Access Control.

The search mechanism in the demo application is simple, based only on exact matches. In a real application, you would want a more sophisticated mechanism.

This documentation refers to the following products: IBM Domino, IBM Domino Designer, IBM Notes®, IBM iNotes®, and IBM Notes Traveler.

Learning objectives

Set up and view an application containing XPage elements
Create an XPage
Add controls to an XPage
Bind data to an XPage
Add navigation to an XPage
Create a custom control
Use advanced binding and scripting

Time required

This tutorial takes approximately 90 minutes to finish.

Lessons in this tutorial

Setting up the sample application
During the course of the tutorial, you create three XPages named Site, SiteFinder, and SiteList. When you first open the sample application, you see existing XPages with similar names. Three of them are final solutions and are named SiteFinal, SiteFinderFinal, and SiteListFinal. Two of them are intermediate solutions and are named Site1 and SiteList1.
Creating an XPage
This lesson teaches you how to create a basic XPage.
Adding a view control
An XPage view control is used to display information from a defined view. The control that you create in this lesson lets you display data from the SiteList view.
Creating an XPage for editing
Forms can also be used to design Web pages, but XPages allow more UI options and greater control of appearance with less effort. It's helpful to also have a form to provide a list of fields for binding data. Also the form can be used to calculate computed fields with field formulas rather than putting code on the XPage.
Creating controls to add and delete documents
The SiteList XPage lets you see and edit documents in the application, but we need to add controls to create and delete documents.
Creating an XPage for searching
The user uses this page to specify search parameters and see the results. The search parameters are values for the city, state, country, and zip code. The user can fill in any of these parameters and click a button. The page is refreshed and results are displayed as a view. A search property for the view limits the display to documents that match the search parameters.

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