Intuitive User Interface Features

Here at Altova we like to share user interface features across products to give the MissionKit a consistent look and feel, and to help users leverage experience gained using one tool to get up to speed more quickly with the others.

In version 2012 we introduced new visual alignment guides in both UModel and MapForce to make it easy to work very rapidly, yet still produce a neat, organized result that communicates effectively with other team members.

As users drag elements in the diagram window, alignment snap lines appear automatically to allow any component to align with any other component.

Get More Mileage from Your StyleVision Designs with Dynamic Selection of CSS Files

One of the great things about StyleVision is the flexibility that it affords. With StyleVision you can design visually sophisticated stylesheets and reports for output to multiple formats including HTML, PDF, and Authentic electronic forms. Now StyleVision makes it even easier to accommodate different formatting needs in a single design with dynamic selection of CSS files – a new feature introduced in StyleVision 2012.

Although you can still manage virtually all formatting tasks from the StyleVision design itself, dynamic selection of CSS files means that you can create a single template for use in multiple situations. To demonstrate, we’ve created an invoice for the fictional Nanonull Corporation for which the design changes based on the number of days that have elapsed between the invoice issue date and the due date. Although we could have used XPath to change the formatting of each element based on the number of days that have elapsed, in this case it is more efficient to create individual CSS files that apply to different scenarios.

XML Editor Supports HTML5 and CSS3

The Altova MissionKit Web tools received an important update with our recent Version 2012 release: support for HTML5 and CSS3. You’ll find support updated to include the most recent versions of these Web standards in both XMLSpy 2012 (and higher) for code editing and StyleVision 2012 for graphical stylesheet and report design.

Let’s focus on the HTML5 and CSS3 editors in XMLSpy here – StyleVision functionality will be covered in a future article.