How to control the look of grid

[chucky3176]

Can anyone help me with this problem I have? I have a grid that shows a web page image. The thing is, I don't want to show the borders, the shades or anything that make it look like a grid. I just want to show a white background and the image, nothing else.

How to do this? I've tried everything in the grid and field properties and I can't get it to work the way I like.

[drgarytraub]

Re: How to control the look of grid

Try this:

Go to Properties->Layout Options->Style Name

From there, you can try different style sheets, or leave that blank to eliminate styling - which may be what you want.

[chucky3176]

Re: How to control the look of grid

Damn. It worked.

You're a genius and why didn't I think of that simple solution of blanking out the style?

[Steve Wood]

Re: How to control the look of grid

Hey, Gary thanks also from me.

I have always wanted to do away with styles completely at the component level and assign them once, at a page level. Or really only once at Application level through a setting I could easily toggle to affect the entire site at once.

Just FYI - Although this works, Alpha still tries to assign a style sheet to the page. The style sheet references will look like these:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css//style.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css//components/a5navSysToolbar/style.css">

Notice the double slashes after "css". It's missing the style name. So it "works" because it cannot find the style. You cannot stop Alpha from putting in that stylesheet reference. (Oh, how I have tried.)

It still 'tries' to assign a style to objects in the Grid, so an HTML tag might look like this:

<td class="DataTD" where it might have normally been:

<td class="SunsetDataTD" if you were using the Sunset style.

But so if you left the component stylesheets blank, and the css classes are still assigned like above in the HTML, that means you could create one new stylesheet that included all of the selectors used in your application, and this would provide formatting you could now control from one CSS file.

You could place <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css"> once on each page, and include all the style selectors and classes in that stylesheet.

[Steve Wood]

Re: How to control the look of grid

Another slight wrinkle in the idea of leaving the style blank is the component will not be able to find various image resources. Like the popup calendar, it won't find the images required for PrevYear, etc. Same with the Grid, it uses several images that won't be found if the style is not designated. The real unfortunate thing is you can't just put those images in the root folder, it still won't find them. It will look here for the images like this:

mydomain/myproject/css//PrevMonth.png
mydomain/myproject/css//AscOn.png

Notice again the double slashes after "css". That's where it is going to look and there is nothing you can do about it because it is hardcoded in the calendar object. (Unless the object can be edited somewhere).

[drgarytraub]

Re: How to control the look of grid

Hi Steve,

You are indeed right about losing some functionality when you use no style sheet, but in some situations, that is okay - as in the requested scenario above, of displaying an image - calendars, etc would not be needed.

[Pat Bremkamp]

Re: How to control the look of grid

An easier way is to go into the component processing section in the head section of the page and rem out the line, for example

?x_Main_Nav.Output.Head.CSS_Link

This is the line that puts in the link.

Do it for any component you want to remove the style sheet for. However, if you have another component that uses the same style, then you'll need to rem it out also.

Note that the navigation style, the simple style and the component style sheets are all different sheets, so you can leave the stlye on the menu, but remove it from the component.

Pat