Introduction

C
ontrols are objects, which are responsible for a piece of data which you see on the final page. The way they express themselves in HTML depends on the current shape of the object.

Typically each control is associated to one of the fields of the database query underlying the page. For eg. in the people page, one control is associated to the login ID of the person, one to the full name of the person (which is a concatenation of three fields on the table underlying the query) and so on.

Almost any where you can have a control, you can have a plain string. One should think of a plain string as a control which in DISP shape outputs itself and in FORM shapes does not output anything. To get the opposite effect use a CommentControl.