Stylesheets within m-Power Applications

m-Power templates utilize embedded on-the-fly-from-a-single-source stylesheets. The main benefit of this is that all style information is contained within the document. That means no matter if your servlet is run off of your application server, sent via email, or downloaded as an Excel File and stored on your PC it will always have the same look and feel. The "classic" templates were unable to have this portability functionality and, as such, downloaded and emailed pages looked drastically different than pages run directly from the application server.

If you open up an application through m-Painter, you will notice the stylesheet information is directly listed on the page. Although it is listed, that information does not get saved to the page and is actually retrieved at run time (It is only listed so m-Painter can mimic what you will see at run time).

However, if you wish to manually include a different look, you can include the styles directly within the servlet through m-Painter.

The extra portability, along with the same runtime functionality, make the new m-Power stylesheets a Win-Win for you as a developer.

But I really want to use my old system? Is this possible?

Of course. However, this method is not encouraged by mrc as you lose all of the portability functionality. Simply edit the file "mrc_servlet_stylesheet_css.html" within your Data Dictionary directory. You will notice many lines of stylesheet information. After making a proper back up, delete all of the text in the file. In its place, enter this information:

</style>

<LINK REL="stylesheet" TYPE="text/ css " HREF="/mrcjava/ mrcclasses/nameofstylesheet.css ">

<style type="text/ css ">

Replacing nameofstylesheet.css with the name of the stylesheet you wish to use.

Of course, it bears repeating, with the method described in this section you lose all of the above listed benefits of including the CSS directly into the source of your servlet.