Notes Color fields, color view columns, color profiles and how they work
Daniel Nashed – 8 December 2024 22:01:24
Color support for views and folders in Notes is pretty cool. The functionality has been around since Notes 6.0 and is unchanged since then.
Someone really nailed it. But it it can be a bit tricky to implement.
The color profile support has been introduced for example for colorizing senders.
If you never used colorizing of senders, you should have a look into the calendar profile.
When trying to implement functionality it is always a good idea to look into what HCL or business partners have already developed and checkout how the functionality is implemented.
There are two different ways to use colors
The simple an straightforward way to use colors is to have a static color definition in a view or folder.
There is a setting in the column options to display the text in the column and all following columns with the specified color.
You can set foreground and background colors. The color settings are valid until the next color column. This means you can define multiple colors in one row Or just colorize some of the columns.
Usually the color columns are hidden. In the designer they still show up as listed below.
Colors are defined as three numbers (not text) in a list. You can combine foreground and background colors resulting in six number list elements.
You can convert text to numbers are shown below.
Using color profiles
The more complex way to use colors is very flexible but a bit tricky.
For each color column you can specify a formula field in a profile.The name of the field is the name of the programmable name of the field.
The result of the formula is used as a color. But in this case the values are text -- very similar to how HTML color definitions look like. Just with two extra digits as a prefix. As you can see in the screen prints.
Here is how it looks like:
Color definitions
You can use color fields which are stored as text. With eight digits.
Those values can be used in formulas. And those formulas are evaluated during view/folder index update.
Here is an example formula using it as a background color as shown in the screen shot above.
Formula
Black:="00000000";
Red:="00FF0000";
Blue:="000000FF00";
Green:="000000FF";
@If(
Subject ="Red";Red;
Subject ="Blue";Blue;
Subject ="Green";Green;
Color) : Black;
The color field has some useful functionality
First of all it is notable that Notes has a color field. The color field can be used in multiple ways.
The main use case is to provide a color picker for an user -- like in the calendar profile.
There are two ways to select colors. The first and most visible way is the "Notes" way.
But there is a second tab to select the RGB values separately.
Color Picker
The color picker is well hidden and shows only up when you hover over the lower part in the color scratch pad.
You can pick colors with a color picker.
Color Picker Trick
When keeping the color tool tip pressed you can pick colors from you whole screen :-)
Notes Documentation "Allowing users to set colors in a view"
Here is the help topic describing the functionality.
https://help.hcl-software.com/dom_designer/14.0.0/basic/H_ALLOWING_USERS_TO_SET_COLORS_IN_A_VIEW_STEPS.html
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