Dynamic Hide/Show of buttons on List Page

Try making the search page as default from the menu. Then move your add new button in the message block. Remove the default message.
This way users go to search first, and only when no results show, they can add new.

** Update *
The above code did change the button background colour, but the link was still active.
I tried adapting the code from the Save Confirm example

Runner.delDisabledClass(pageobj.saveButton);

i.e.

Runner.delDisabledClass(pageobj.addButton);
This didn't do anything.
So then I tried:

document.getElementById("addButton1").disabled = false;
This did disable the button, but the colours were unchanged. Slowly getting there.

Further update..

What I've got working requires a combination of the PHPRunner code and the raw JS.
Runner.addDisabledClass(pageobj.addButton); // to manage the colours

document.getElementById("addButton1").disabled = true; // to actually disable
And to re-enable the button with the correct colours.

Runner.delDisabledClass(pageobj.addButton); // to manage the colours

document.getElementById("addButton1").disabled = false; // to actually enable
Possible not the most elegant, but it seems to be working as I require for disabling/enabling.

Does onyone have any suggestions on how to detect whether a basic search has been initiated on a list page? As I need to detect this in order to enable the button again.

Thanks for the suggestion. Currently the users have a single "Customer Search' menu option which is basically a list page, with popup Add, Edit and View pages. The search bar has been simplified leaving just the search field and the only 2 fields on the list page are searchable last name and post code. The users don't use the Advanced Search or the extended basic search.

To cut a long boring story short........here is what I found works.
To disable/enable the Add new button on a List Page.
In the _[b]BeforeDisplay_event - create a proxy variable to indicate whether the button should be disabled (false) or enabled (true). I have chosen to make this decision according to whether or not the user has submitted a search to check if the record already exists, more of this further on.
$pageObject->setProxyValue("Show_Button", False); [color="#008000"]// default to false

if (strlen($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']) > 0) {

if (substr($_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'],0,1) == "q") { [color="#008000"]// and is it a search and not a return.

$pageObject->setProxyValue("Show_Button", true);}

}
In the JSOnLoad event include the following code. This is a modified version of the code in the PHPRunner manual.



// Disable/Enable 'Add New' button

var id = "addButton";

var button = $("[id^=" + id + "]");
if (proxy['Show_Button'] == true) {

Runner.delDisabledClass(button);

document.getElementById("addButton1").disabled = false; [color="#008000"]// this actually disables but doesn't change the colours

}

else {

Runner.addDisabledClass(button);

document.getElementById("addButton1").disabled = true; [color="#008000"]// this actually disables but doesn't change the colours

}
A note on $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'].
The contents can be checked for different searches by looking at the webpage address, what I found was as follows:

1. a=return - when return to the master table from the detail table.
   
2. q= something - when either basic search or advanced search is used.
   
3. qs = something - when using the simple combo search field.
   If AJAX search, sorting and pagination is selected (ticked) for the List Page only Advanced Search will populate QUERY_STRING, even though the other 2 methods still work.