An AbtLnFormNote describes the properties of a Domino form. The fields in a form note do not directly correspond to the entry fields in the form. The fields in the form note are used to describe how a form works, how it looks, and what fields are defined in the form. There are convenient methods in the class AbtLnFormNote to retrieve relevant data from forms.

A typical form definition (like the "Server Connection" of your names and address book) contains some 50 fields. Helping you understand the meaning of each field is beyond the scope of this document. See your Domino documentation or API toolkit documentation for more information on fields in form documents.

A form is composed of typed entry fields. Those entry fields are used to display and enter data into documents. When building a form with the Domino designer, you can specify the name of an entry field, its data type (for example Text, Number, RTF) and some other properties like access control settings and field formulas.

Use the methods formNoteByName: or allFormNotes implemented in AbtLnDatabase to retrieve form documents.

Domino Connection support two levels of access to the field information of a form:

The class AbtLnFormNote supplies a protocol to find out about some of the important form properties. Because a form can have one or more names/alias names, you can use the name or allFormNames methods of AbtLnFormNote to retrieve the name(s) as String or if alias names are present as an OrderedCollection of Strings. In addition you can gather structural information about a form using the allFieldNamesAndTypes selector. This method returns an OrderedCollection of Associations containing the name of the field as key and the type definition (that is the AbtLnItem subclass) as value.

To retrieve a full functional description of a form's field definition you must use the allFormFields method. The result will be an OrderedCollection of instances of subclasses of AbtLnFormField. The class AbtLnFormField models the properties of a field definition in a form. There is a subclass for each type of entry field. For example the AbtLnFormFieldKeywords class offers methods to find out about the predefined keyword list (method keywords) and about the set of formulas associated with the field: the default value formula, the input translation formula, the input validation formula and, if any, the keyword list creation formula.