How do I use apply custom styles to my forms?

We are looking to use alternate styles for the look and feel of the Metastorm OOTB forms. Is there a way to switch off the hard coding of styles to every form element that is created in the designer?

Our ultimate goal is to make the style sheets used by a form dynamic at run time, so the form look and feel varies for each logged on user, dependent on the product/branding they have logged on as.

At present, it is looking like we will have to use custom forms for all out Metastorm BPM stages and actions so that we have this level of control. In so doing, however, we discard the development advantages provided by "Designer" created forms that have all the necessary plumbing already present.

Thanks in advance for your advice,

Adrian.

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Comments

Paul Lawrence

It really depends on what/how much you are trying to achieve.

If you just want some branding you could have form headers with dynamic images for company logos etc, this is solution we have used quite a bit. You'll just need a lookup based on your form criteria to set the specific image urls.

If you want a greater extent of branding you'll need to modify the css/images for the web extensions (version9). This will apply to all content accessed through those web extensions however you could create multiple web extensions and point your users to a specific web extension through a set of engine services. This would work for relatively low numbers of configurations but would be a bit unweildy if you were looking to have a large number of configurations.

If you are on v7 then the same could be achieved but it would be a whole lot more work.

Hope this gives you a few ideas.

Paul

Adrian Tonkin

Thanks Paul for the answer and advice.

I agree that this could be achieved with relative ease by dynamically varying the logo & perhaps heading text.

What I am looking for goes deeper than a custom header on the form. Ideally, what I would like to see is a proper implementation of style sheets within the forms, whereby each type of form element has a named class (e.g.. "textbox1") that I can define in a separate CSS style sheet. At present, every form element has it's style properties embedded as part of the HTML declaration. Perhaps one of the Metastorm architects can shed some light to the thinking behind this approach.