Creating a response hierarchy

About this task

If you are creating an application in which users can post responses to a main document, and responses to the responses, you need to set up a hierarchy between the forms. There are three types of forms you can designate:

  • Document form -- The top level in a hierarchy of forms. It is often called the Main topic form and can have zero or more response forms associated with it. A form creates main (parent) documents unless you designate it as a form that creates response documents.
  • Response form -- Creates response documents associated with a main document. In a view, users select a main document and then compose a response. The response documents appear under the main document. Designers often create response documents that inherit data from the main document -- for example, the topic title.
  • Response-to-response form -- Creates response documents associated with either a main document or a response document.

For information on indenting a response document under its parent document in a view, see Indenting response documents.

To create a response or response-to-response form

Procedure

  1. Open a form.
  2. Choose Design - Form Properties.
  3. On the Form Info tab, choose one of the following form types:
    • Select "Response" for the form used to create responses to main documents.
    • Select "Response to Response" for the form used to create responses to other responses.

To include a parent document in a new document

About this task

To make it easy for users to find a related document, a document can include a parent or related document as a link, as collapsible rich text, or as rich text. For example, a new response document can include a link to its main document. A link takes up less disk space than a parent document because Domino® stores only a pointer to the document rather than a copy of the document.

When inheritance is enabled, the user selects a document and then chooses Create - <response/new form name>. The selected document becomes the parent document. The documents do not need a main document/response document relationship, because the selected document is assumed to be the parent document. A user can suppress inheritance by pressing CTRL while choosing Create.

Procedure

  1. Open the form.
  2. Create a new rich text field to display the document or link.
  3. Choose Design - Form Properties.
  4. Click the Defaults tab.
  5. Select "On Create: Inherit entire selected document into rich text field."
  6. Select or enter the name of the rich text field you created in Step 2.
  7. Select one of the following:
    • Link
    • Collapsible rich text
    • Rich text
  8. Optional: Select "On Open: Show context pane" and Parent.