6 Style Sheets

Web Functions Wizard

6. Style Sheets

The Web Functions Wizard allows you to quickly create a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to be used with your Web function application. You can use a CSS to define:

  • the presentation of an HTML element, including the font (face, size and color), background color,
  • the positioning of elements within your HTML page, and
  • text decoration such as italics or underline.

Style sheets can be created in the Wizard using a free-format editor or using a tag assistant to build simple CSS rules.

Designing simple style sheets is easy. To get started, you need to understand some HTML and some basic CSS concepts.

For example, to set the text color of the 'H1' elements to blue you could define the simple CSS rule:

H1{color : blue} 

This rule consists of two main parts:

  • the selector ('H1') and
  • the declaration ('color : blue').

The selector may be an HTML element (tag), a class, sub-class or id. The selector is the link between the HTML document and the style sheet. All HTML elements are possible selectors.

The declaration has two parts: the property ('color') and the value ('blue'). The 'color' property is one of about 50 properties which determine the presentation of an HTML page.

In your Web Function Application, modifications to a style sheet will impact the process nominated as the current process on the left hand menu bar. The style sheet customization applies to all the LANSA functions defined in the current process. Style sheets are partition specific.

Any modifications to your style sheet will be immediately available in your Web function application (i.e. no function compiles or layout configuration changes are required).

Before changing the System Default Style Sheet component (current process DEFAULT), be sure that you have read Impact on Existing Applications.

For more details, refer to Cascading Style Sheets , a good reference book on Dynamic HTML (DHTML) or the World Wide Web Consortium at http://www.w3c.org