Preventing Design Inheritance

Domino Designer enables you to restrict design inheritance on individual design elements or all design elements in a database. Inheritance is the process of distributing design changes (automatically or manually) to one or more databases that are set up to inherit some or all design elements from the template database. You can restrict design inheritance for individual design elements by selecting the option Prohibit Design Refresh or Replace to Modify. Optionally, you can also set the property Propagate This Prohibition of Design Change to propagate this setting to databases inheriting their designs. These settings can be set and modified on the design documents properties dialog (see Figure 2.6).

A new feature with Domino 6, available on the database properties Design tab, enables the designer to set the database to Refresh Design on Admin Server Only. Therefore, databases with replicas on other servers do not attempt to refresh their designs when the Design task runs. Users must have Designer or Manager access to replace or refresh a database design.

Some applications may have an open design, allowing designers to modify design elements to suit the application's specific requirements. If a databases design element is modified and the database is set up to inherit its design from a design template, the modifications are lost when the Design task runs (or the database design is manually refreshed). However, setting the check box to Prohibit Design Refresh or Replace to Modify protects the design refresh from overwriting the modifications.

With Domino 6, you can update multiple design element properties at one time. Select multiple design elements from the Designer client (such as views), using the CTRL or SHIFT keys. Then click the properties icon, select File, Properties from the drop-down menu, or right-click on the highlighted elements and select Design Properties… from the menu. This opens the Design Documents properties box, enabling you to set common properties for all the design elements at one time (see Figure 2.6).