From the limited feedback I received on the flyout menus what I did get was a couple of questions (as in, literally, two people asked) about how I managed to provide a login form that wasn't just the default Domino one. It seems people are unaware how simple this is to do. No, there isn't any special jiggery-pokery going on server-side. It's just a few lines of Passthru HTML!

Here's a screenshot of the Form:

Yep. It's all just passthru HTML. What we have is a form (the bit between the red lines is the important part) that simply mimics the default Domino login form. By design it always points to the same place, so we can simply hard code the action parameter of the form to "/names.nsf?login". The field names are always the same too, so we just need to make sure we have the two fields on our "fake" form -- one called Username and one called Password.

The other field I've added is optional but useful nonetheless. It's called RedirectTo and does pretty much what its name suggests. If you pass the path of the page you're currently viewing to this field then a succussful login will return the authenticated user back to the same page. To do this you can see I've used a Computed Value for the input's value. To pass the path of the current page the Formula for the Computed Value is simply Path_Info, which is the name of a self-referencing CGI field you need to add to your form.

All very straight-forward so far. Now for the painful part.

Form elements in HTML can not be nested. This means that if there's an open <orm> tag on the page then you need to close it with a </form> before you can include the above PassThru!

The trouble is that Domino has a tendency to stick in its own form tags even when you don't need them. Predicting whether it will or not isn't as easy as you'd think. It's easier to assume it will and so we need to close Domino's form with a close form tag at the top of our form.

Closing Domino's form can mean the actual Form that you've embedded the login form in to no longer works. Whether you feel safe doing this or not depends on each application. In most cases you need to be logged in to create stuff anyway, so there's no need to worry about the Forms and whether they can be submitted or not.

If you can't close Domino's Form and still need an embedded login form then you can always stick it right at the bottom of the Form. You then know that all your fields and buttons will still function. You just then need to use CSS to move the login form back to the top somewhere using absolute positioning.

One thing's for sure. While it might be easy to do it's not always as simple as it should be. This, as ever, is because of Domino. I read somewhere that massive changes to the way Domino produces HTML are on there way in version 8.5. Not a moment too soon. I just hope it's going to answer at least some of the pains of developing with Domino, such as this one. Things that should be so simple are often a headache.

Further reading: Custom Login Forms - A How-To - how to configure Domino to use a custom login form for each database.