How do I (velocity) determine if the user is creating a new entry to a class

My apologies if the answer is obvious (new to xwiki here), but I’ve not been able to find an answer in my searches.

For an application created with the “App Within Minutes”, how do I determine (through velocity I reckon) if the user is creating a new entry to a class (first time, I reckon this will happen only once per entry)
or else if the user is editing an already created form.

Nb. the idea is that I can edit the class sheet to show/not show the page object during creation of a new entry.

Thank you in advance for any and all help!

ended up going with a groupcheck to determine if editors get (easy) acces to the specific field values

 if ($xwiki.getUser($xcontext.user).isUserInGroup('XWiki.groupname')