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New Ways to Customize Designer in 8.5.3 Click here to see all the Developer/Admin Tips

Date tip published:04/09/2012
Description:Designer 8.5.3 added two nice features to allow a developer to customize Designer. First, there are now new perspectives tailored for either a traditional Notes developer (no XPages) or an XPages developer. These new perspectives hide the design elements in the Applications Navigator that would not be needed. Plus, the Forms/Views Perspective will hide the XPages related views like Outline and Controls Palette allowing for more screen "real estate". Finally, the Domino design elements in the Applications Navigator can be customized for each perspective to only show the design elements you need.


To learn more about more about Domino Designer 8.5 and XPages use the following links:

Notes Domino 8.5 Application Development Update
Developing XPages using Domino Designer 8.5
XPages Development 2 for Notes and Domino 8.5



New Perspectives in Domino Designer 8.5.3

You can switch between multiple design perspectives using the Window | Open Perspective menu option. The multiple design perspectives allow developers to focus on a particular design task such as traditional Form and View development versus XPages or Java development. The "XPages" and "Forms/Views" perspectives were introduced in release 8.5.3. The image below shows the selection of the "XPages" design perspective.




The "XPages" perspective shows design elements (in the Applications Navigator) necessary for XPage applications and displays the Eclipse views needed for XPages (Package Explorer, Outline, Events, Controls and Data palettes, etc) as shown below.


The "Forms/Views" Perspective shows only the Eclipse views needed for traditional Notes/Domino design (no XPages). The Applications Navigator in this perspective will filter out any design element not needed by a non-XPages developer.


Form/Views design perspective


Filter the Design Elements available in the Applications Navigator

Release 8.5.3 also introduced the ability to select and filter the design element types that are displayed in the Applications Navigator and available from the Create | Design menu.

In the Designer Preferences, expand Domino Designer and click Applications Navigator in the left navigator as shown below. Next, select the desired 'Perspective' from the drop-down list to set the selections and filtering options separately for each of the three Designer-related perspectives: "Domino Designer", "XPages", and "Forms/Views". Finally, choose the design elements you prefer to work with and display by checking (show) or unchecking (hide) the elements in the selection area. In this example, the developer has chosen to hide the Navigators and Composite Applications elements for the Domino Designer perspective.




After saving the preferences, notice the Navigators and Composite Applications design elements are no longer displayed in the Applications Navigator and are not available for selection in the Create |Design menu.