All prior described methods were operating on preexisting documents. The following section describes how to create a new document using the structure of a form definition.

Creating a "blank" document is very easy. Send the newNote message to an open instance of AbtLnDatabase and you will receive an empty document. Using the addItemNamed: protocols introduced in the last chapter, you can fill in items for your purpose. There is a more convenient way to create documents which are preinitialized according to a form definition. Use the newNoteFromForm: message to create a new document containing all field definitions that are available in the referenced form. When you create a document using newNoteFromForm:, form formulas will be executed: the default value formula on creation of the document, the input translation and input validation formulas on storing the document. An exception is signaled if one of the formulas fails to evaluate properly.

The example below copies a document from the sample discussion database to the sample mail database and adds some fields necessary to show up in the mail database's views.

With Domino Connection you receive another sample database called abtlncl.nsf. It is a database designed to hold information about Smalltalk methods. There is a very simple form called Method which displays some of the relevant information about a Smalltalk method: the name of the class the method is implemented in, the name of the application the class is defined in, and the actual method selector. You can easily add more fields to this form to expand the database into a "class reference", or even to enhance it in a way that you can share code with other remote users. Here is a piece of code to show you how you can initially fill the database with all method information for the AbtLnBaseApp application.