Bananas - bananahome.com

Have you ever been irritated that you need to fire up Domino Designer to create and manage your custom login forms? I certainly have. I've thought about doing something about it for quite some time, but there's always been something more pressing to do. It's not that I mind working in Domino Designer, but it feels like the wrong tool for the job. It should be administration work, not development work. There are also a lot of administrators out there, that aren't comfortable with Domino Designer.

Anyway, I revisited the problem the other day, and finally did something about it. I created an application to make it possible to handle any custom login form through the Notes Client, instead of Domino Designer. I created it in ND8, pretty soon got it working on the server, and figured I was ready. I wasn't.

I also have a Domino 7 server, and that wouldn't work. It seems there's been some change to how Domino handles login forms between 7 and 8. In 8, I could use a form with content type HTML, which will not work in 7. So I had to make sure it would work on both of my servers, which it does now. My guess is that it should work with R5 and ND6 as well, but I don't have any way to test it.

This isn't brain surgery, it's a very simple application, but I haven't seen one like it. So to help others out there, that might have the same kind of problem, I've made the application available for download here (and under Banana Applications on the right). Try it out, and let me know if it works for you.

1. Steve McDonagh2008-07-17 00:37:48
Homepage: http://dominoyesmaybe.blogspot.com

Peter
You can do it with a little bit of work from pure HTML and JS with one of the AJAX frameworks. I have a working example over on my blog that you can download and play with. It isnt to difficult and it is compatible back to around V5. The blog entry is here { Link }

Steve

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2. Peter2008-07-17 10:23:04

@Steve: It's correct that you can login directly from HTML in any web form, in any application. I've used it in many web applications myself. What I've done here, though, is to manage the login forms that you would normally manage in domcfg.nsf, using Domino Designer. That is what Domino will present to a web user, when they access a database application or file protection that has access restrictions.

It is definitely good to have your own login functionality in an application, but it's not enough if the user authenticates in another application, before coming to the one with the login form. Besides, there are companies that don't want special login forms for each application, but prefers to have one for the whole server.

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