title: Enable/disable editing of a form field from code
body: <p>I'm not a Notes programmer, however, for my sins, have been working on some Notes features for an in-house project recently. I need to enable/disable editing of a field depending on circumstances. It seems to me to be a fairly standard feature, I need, but I can't find any information on how to do this anywhere.</p>
  
  <p>In form setup (and other field's <code>onchange</code>) code, something like the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>if some requirement = true then
      textField.enable = true
  else
      textField.enable = false
  end if
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I've seen other places where there's a workaround of conditionally hiding paragraphs based on some code, having 2 paragraphs with opposite hiding conditions, one with an editable field, the other with a computed field. However, I don't know enough about Notes to see how this is implemented (I can see it done on other forms, but there seem to be some 'magic' steps within Notes which I either can't see or don't get).</p>
  
  <p>[EDIT]
  The reply from Kerr seems to be what I'm looking for, but I still can't find out where the InputEnabled property is located. Should have said in the initial question, I'm using Notes 7.0.3.</p>
  
  <p>In fairness, it doesn't matter what the circumstances are for when to enable/disable the field, it's just some boolean condition that is set, in my case only on form loading so I don't even have to worry about this changing dynamically while the form is displayed.</p>
  
  <p>I've got a few issues with Notes, my largest bugbear being that it's so tied so tightly to the Designer UI, which is utter shite. I can do this sort of thing programmatically in most GUI languages (C#, Java, Delphi, even VB), but I need to open property boxes in Notes and set them correctly. </p>
  
  <p>This would be OK as an <em>optional</em> method, but <em>forcing</em> you to go this way means you can only work as well as the IDE lets you in this case, and the IDE here seems to actively work against you. You can't open multiple functions/scripts, you can't swap from one script to another without going back to the menus on the left, you can't easily search the codebase for occurrences of variables/fields (and believe me, this is a major failing for me because either Notes or the internal codebase in my case seems to make a lot of use of global variables!), you can only work with fields through the property boxes that get displayed, you can't edit code in Designer while debugging through the main Notes client. </p>
  
  <p>While the Java side of the coding is better than LotusScript, it's still fairly crappy (why can't you debug INTO Java code?? Why do you need to re-import JAR files for each Java class, does each class have a different CLASSPATH???). Possibly this was improved in Notes 8, I hear it's based on Eclipse. Does anyone know whether this is true or not?</p>