What are Modes?

E
very page can be in one of several modes. The set of allowable modes can and do vary from page to page. That said, the typical page has only two modes: display and edit.

Modes and shapes are closely related but not identical. Generally, some of the modes for a page will result in the user seeing a nicely formatted representation of the relevant information, while others will present the user with a form, allowing her to modify the information. The former shape is shapes.DISP, while the latter is shapes.FORM.

As a concrete example, a person page has two modes: display and edit. In display mode, the page uses shapes.DISP shape, and in edit mode it uses shapes.FORM. To avoid confusion, it helps to refer to the shapes as 'disp and form' instead of 'display and form'.

One page which has a host of different modes is the courses/description page.