General guidelines

Here are a few general guidelines that most web applications should follow. These are not strictly necessary, of course, but you can improve your application and avoid certain problems if you follow them.

Create some diagnostic views

Especially if you inherit maintenance responsibility for an existing application, it may be a bit difficult at first to understand the application just by examining it with a browser. With the Notes client, look through the existing views to gain an understanding of what documents exist and how they are organized.

If the existing views do not provide the answers you need, consider adding one or more new views that present the documents in ways that are useful to you. These diagnostic or troubleshooting views are intended only for you, and perhaps the application administrator. Do not design them for the end user, and probably not even for display on the Web. Do not use them for lookups or any other processing. Identify them clearly. If you...