We don't know how many of you use the preview pane to look at a message quickly while in a view, instead of having to open up the document. For those of you that do, you have probably noticed that the preview pane successfully works in your R5 mail file, which has a framed interface. If you try to set up your own framed interface with navigation in the left frame and a view in the right frame, then attempt to use the preview pane on that view, you can get an error message. So what's different about the mail file and your frameset?

Actually, there are a few things different. They all have to do with using the preview pane in a frameset, and none are obvious at all.

The first thing you need to do is to make a hidden frame ready to hold the document preview. So, in your frameset, define a frame 0 pixels tall. There doesn't have to be any content to the frame. It will hold the document preview. What you need to do is give the frame a name of "NotesPreview". Why this name? Well, frankly, because that's the only way it will work. You'll see in a minute how it all goes together. But this is a key frame name to Notes that says "here is where the document being previewed is supposed to appear."

The second thing you need to do is to look at your frame that holds your view. This frame should be named "NotesView" and have a "Default target for links in this frame" setting to "NotesPreview". Technically, I'm not 100% sure you need to call the frame "NotesView", but I do know that you need to set up the default target to "NotesPreview" for this to work.

Now, when you look at your frameset and click on the icon to open up the preview pane, the fact that there's a hidden frame called "NotesPreview" and your view is targeting that frame kicks in, and the Notes client will open up that previously hidden frame and have a preview of the current document in that frame.

If you take a look at the design of some of the standard templates that ship with Notes release 5, like mail (mail50.ntf) or the personal journal (journal5.ntf), you'll see this technique used. And if you look at some others, like the discussion template (discsw50.ntf), you won't see this technique used and you can't preview a document (you get a "cannot execute the specified command" error).