We recently were working on a database that had a view using new ND6 features, but the view was still going to be used by a few R5 clients. We thought we'd share a couple things we learned from this experience.

The application was a "process" database. The basic premise was "go through these steps to achieve the desired result". Some of the steps would not always apply, so the view needed to have two action buttons - one to mark the step as "not applicable" and another to mark it as "applicable" in case the first was done by accident.

When a step was marked N/A, we wanted to change the foreground color of the text to differentiate it from the other steps. So, we added a color column to the view. You can read up about the specifics of this, but basically you click the "Use value as color" checkbox in the column properties. Then, your column should have an array of three or six numbers. If it's just three numbers, then it's the foreground color of the text that appears after that column. If it's six numbers, then it's the foreground and background colors of the columns that appear after the color column. (The background value is the first three numbers, the foreground is the second three numbers).

Each set of three numbers is the decimal RGB values for the color. For example, 255 : 0 : 0 would be the foreground (text) color red.

Using this new feature will not have an adverse affect on your R5 users. They will not see the colors as intended, but they also will not get any error messages and the view will behave as it always has for your R5 users.

The other feature we tried out is outlined in this tip. The "mark step not applicable" and "mark step applicable" buttons are mutually exclusive - only one button should appear on any given step. If the step is currently N/A, then the "mark step applicable" button should appear, otherwise the "mark step not applicable" button should appear.

We implemented that code and it worked perfectly for the ND6 clients. But when we tested it with our R5 client, we noticed that neither button appeared. So, if you're using that feature to show/hide buttons in views, then make sure you know your audience. The work around we employed was to duplicate both of those buttons. So we ended up having two "mark step not applicable" buttons and two "mark step applicable" buttons. On one of each of the buttons, we wiped out the computed hide-when formula and added a new one:

@TextToNumber(@Version) >= 184

This hide formula says that the button should be hidden for ND6 clients and higher. Those clients will be using the buttons that show/hide based on what document you're on. So now both buttons appear on every document for our R5 users.

The last feature we employed was talked about in another tip. We made use of form formulas in the view to open up different forms for the R5 and ND6 users. The forms had the same fields, but the ND6 form used some pass-through HTML to achieve a desired effect that was a lot more complicated in the R5 form.