Show-n-Tell Thursday - updating folder design

Folders can be a really useful design element. The only problem is that if you allow users to create shared folders in a production database, they don't inherit design changes from the template's default folder. Here's a fairly simple way to selectively update the design of those folders, or even allow an end user to update the design (after a developer has made changes and refreshed the design of the default folder from the template.)

Create a form that contains two visible dialog list fields, folderChoices and templateFolder. Also create a hidden field called folderList and a SaveOptions field set to "0". The default value of folderList should be @Unique(folderList). folderChoices should be set up to use formula for choices, and the formula should just be the field name folderList. The default value of templateFolder could go two ways: if you have only one folder template, make the field a text field instead, and set the default value to the name of the template folder. If, as we do, you have more than one folder design that can be used as a template, leave the field as a dialog list using formula for choices, and set the default value to folderList : "(Default Folder)" where the appended value is the name of your default folder (hidden in our case.)

Add this code to your PostOpen event:

Sub Postopen(Source As Notesuidocument)
 Dim s As New notessession
 Dim db As notesdatabase
 Dim fList As NotesItem
 Dim doc As notesdocument
 
 Set db = s.CurrentDatabase
 Set doc = Source.Document
 Set fList = doc.GetFirstItem("folderList")
 Forall v In db.Views
  If v.isfolder And v.name <> "Default Folder" And v.name <> "(Default Folder)"  And Not fList.Contains(v.name) Then
   Call fList.AppendToTextList(v.name)
  End If
 End Forall
End Sub

Create a button and put this code behind it:

Sub Click(Source As Button)
 On Error Goto errhand
 
 Dim w As New notesuiworkspace
 Dim db As NotesDatabase
 Dim folderTemplate As String
 Dim doc As notesdocument
 Dim fName As String
 
 Set db = w.currentdatabase.database
 Set doc = w.currentdocument.document
 folderTemplate = doc.templateFolder(0)
 
 Forall x In doc.folderChoices
  fName = Replace(x, "\" , "\\") Evaluate(|@UpdateViewDesign("|& fName & |";"| &  folderTemplate & |")|)
 End Forall
 Msgbox "Update complete"
 Exit Sub
errhand:
 Msgbox "error at line " & Erl & ": " & Error
 Exit Sub
End Sub

Add a button or outline entry in your database navigation that creates a new document using this form. The user can then choose which folders to update, and which folder to use as the design template.

LotusScript was converted to HTML using the ls2html routine,
provided by Julian Robichaux at nsftools.com.

Show-n-Tell Thursday