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Workplace Designer components support the role-based security model of Workplace applications. After you deploy the component and add the component to an application or application template, you can set access to components by mapping component roles to the roles in that specific Workplace application. For instance, if you map the template role Contributor to the component role Reader, users with Contributor access to the application will have Reader access to the component.

Workplace Designer provides a methodology to easily deploy components to the Workplace server to be used in Workplace applications. This involves creating a deployment profile in Workplace Designer. For more information, consult the Workplace Designer online help.

Forms
Similar to Notes/Domino forms, a Workplace Designer form is the primary user interface for interacting with IBM Workplace components. Forms in the component let users input and display information. A component can have numerous forms. To allow the component user to navigate from form to form in the current component, the component developer can leverage the form properties or use UI controls.

The form is the central design element in Workplace Designer. In Notes/Domino application development, there are many different standalone design elements, including views, agents, and so on. Workplace Designer has one basic element, the form. To create a view, you must embed it in a form; to run the Workplace equivalent of a Notes/Domino agent, you have to make it an event on the form, and so on. In addition, Notes/Domino defines data as part of the form design. Workplace Designer defines data in separate schemas then the developer binds the UI controls to the schema elements. If you don't have an existing schema during form design, Workplace Designer can build the schema for you as you specify the data binding for the UI controls. Note that you need to create a component before you can create a form.

Workplace Designer offers several different ways for you to create a new form. You can start with a blank form, import a form from a Domino database, or copy an existing form. When you create a new blank form, you are prompted for the name of the form, a comment, and whether or not to:

• Create a schema for this form
• Use an existing schema
• Not use a schema

Form Editor
To create, view, and edit forms, Workplace Designer includes the Form editor (visible in Figure 2). You can use this graphical editor to arrange artifacts such as UI controls, buttons, graphics, and so on. These elements are added using the UI control palette (described below). You can then drag-and-drop these components into the form. Workplace Designer lets you do data validation at several levels. Field-level validation is related to field type and allowed values. Document-level validation happens when multiple fields are involved in the validation process. Depending on the type of validation, it can occur on the client prior to submitting the data, or on the server prior to updating the backend document.

You can select UI controls from the palette and insert them into the form you are designing.

View Controls
As mentioned previously, one area in which Workplace Designer differs from Domino Designer is how it handles views. Views are UI controls that can be added to a form to display a collection of documents. In Workplace Designer, views are controlled through forms. To create a view, you have to insert a view control into a form and then associate one or more schemas and individual fields to the view. View controls provide a way to separate the presentation of the view from the data that will eventually populate it. After inserting a view control into a form, you can modify the format of the control, similar to any other user interface control, using styles or custom formatting properties.

Container Controls
A container control (as the name implies) is a UI control that can contain other UI controls. There are three kinds of container controls:

• Panel is a rectangular area on a form to which you can add core controls. Panels can also be used to refer to other documents and to repeat over a selected XML node.
• Table contains individual cells. You can add controls into the table cells.
• View is a rectangular section on the form that contains rows and columns of data extracted from XML, based on a defined query.

UI Controls
An important concept in Workplace Designer development is the UI control. These are graphical elements (for instance, a button or link) that users can interact with. Workplace Designer offers a large set of UI controls that you can add to your forms. These include edit box, multi-line edit box, button, list box, combo box, check box, radio button, link, computed field, and image. These UI controls are accessible through the UI control palette (Figure 3), located in the upper-right section of the Form editor interface.

Events
A vital part of any development environment is event handling. Workplace Designer supports several types of event controls, including:

• UI control events. Each UI control can have a set of client-side events. For instance, a button can produce an "on click" event. The code can be executed at either server side or client side.
• Component events. These are standard IBM Workplace Collaboration Services events; for example, when a component is instantiated or when a member is added or removed to the Workplace application. These events are defined and handled at the component level, using a set of event global properties. (Note: An iFix is required to be applied to the server for this to work.)
• Form/Document events. Form events support events on edit controls, such as open, close, onSave, postSave, and so on. Document events support the same events as form events.

Scripting
As we mentioned earlier, Workplace Designer includes a complete JavaScript scripting environment for developing applications. This lets you create relatively complex programs in an easily understood language. The scripts can run on either the server or the client.

The scripting environment includes script libraries for storing reusable code. Workplace Designer's JavaScript interpreter comes with a set of predefined, native libraries that expose all the major IBM Workplace Collaboration Services APIs. (The JavaScript interpreter also features a Java bridge that let you directly call any Java API.) You can also create your own script libraries of reusable script code, or copy/paste script libraries between components.

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