About Fields, Properties, and Values

People use controls to interact with the pages of a form at run time. A field stores a control's value, either as text or as another data type. To create this relationship, you first create a field and then associate (or "bind") a control with it. If the form uses read and compose versions of a page, you will probably want these versions to share a number of fields that share values. For example, you will probably want the Subject text box on the read version of the Message page to display the same text as the Subject text box on the compose version. To do this, assocate each of those two controls (the two text boxes) with the same field. In this way, a field becomes the common denominator, a sort of "glue," between the control in the read version and the control in the compose version. This means that, if you change a field value in one place, this value changes everywhere the field is used. For more information, see Binding Controls to Fields in the Enhanced LitCrit Form.

In most cases, you bind TextBox, CheckBox, ListBox, ComboBox, and OptionButton controls to fields. Other controls, such as Label and Image controls, that contain static information with which the user does not interact, are generally not bound to a field.

A field does not reside on a specific page of the form. When you work with a field in script, for example, you can identify it without referring to a page. But when you work with a control, you must specify the page and the control name.

A field is not a property. Properties are aspects of the control that affect its appearance and behavior. Two examples of control properties are Visible and ReadOnly, which can have values of True or False.

Assigning Data Types

Be careful when assigning data types to controls; it is possible to choose a type that does not work for you (for example, assigning a string to a check box) and Microsoft Outlook does not correct your error. You might only find out later, when running the form, that it was an error.

However, you can use text strings with option buttons, because they can enumerate a set of values. In LitCrit, for example, option buttons are used to choose from among various media types, represented by the strings "book," "period," (for periodical) "software," "av" (for audio/visual) and so on.

Each control can use one custom property, which you can assign to the control. You can assign to this property any of several types, including "value."