We have recently upgraded to 5.5 from 3.1. The problem is; only asset TextData that is on one line will drop into an open document. I have 4 assets and the LRBMandate, ILCSSec and Text work. The Test asset which is on multiple lines will not drop into the document. These are local assets that are created by the users dragging chucks of xml to the resource manager. I had to manually edit the ILCSSec asset to get it to work. This feature worked in 3.1. Here is the fxitems.xml:
%ASK:Description:%{Description}
LRBMandate (syn: em)
ILCSSec (25 ILCS 5/1)(from Ch. 63, par. 1)Sec. 1. That the sessions of the General Assembly shall be held at the seat of government: Provided, that the Governor may convene the General Assembly at some other place when it is necessary, in case of pestilence or public danger.(Source: R.S. 1874, p. 555.)]]>
Test (25 ILCS 5/1)(from Ch. 63, par. 1)
Sec. 1. That the sessions of the General Assembly shall be held at the seat of government: Provided, that the Governor may convene the General Assembly at some other place when it is necessary, in case of pestilence or public danger.(Source: R.S. 1874, p. 555.) ]]>
My understanding is that the My Assets feature of adding material to the assets folder has changed in XMetaL 5.5. Users can no longer add to the My Assets folder.
We had a feature called “MyTextBlocks” in XMetaL 4.6. It worked like the My Assets folder, however, it no longer works in 5.5.
My question: Aside from having our users agree on a base set of “My Assets” or “MyTextBlocks” that we deploy, is there a workaround to this yet? Our users did use this feature frequently.
I'll address these two issues separately: – Adding items to the Assets tab – Line breaks within items in the Assets tab
Items that appear in the Assets tab are stored in a subfolder of C:Program Files . Under Windows Vista many users can't edit files within C:Program Files, so if you are using Vista you probably won't be able to add items to My Assets.
By default, XMetaL is configured to not try to write to C:Program Files, because doing so would result in errors for people who don't have permissions to write to C:Program Files. This means that a few features, including My Assets, are turned off. However, under Windows XP, or under Vista with appropriate privileges, you can run XMetaL in a mode that will allow you to write to My Assets. We call this the “local admin” mode. To do this:
1) Open the C:Program FilesXMetaL x.xAuthorXMetaLxx.ini file. 2) Find the line that says user_setting_mode=per_user . 3) Change this line to user_setting_mode=default.
Regarding line breaks within items in the Assets tab, it is a known issue that assets containing line breaks cannot be dragged into the document. The possible workarounds are:
– You could turn pretty printing off in the CTM file. However, this also requires you to remove carriage returns from existing documents as well because XMetaL Author does not remove pre-existing carriage returns from existing documents after pretty printing is turned off (because it does not presume to know whether you actually want them or not). A script can be written to do that however.
– A manual workaround that appears to resolve the problem is to right click on the asset in the Assets tab, select “copy” and then paste (using Ctrl+V or other method) into the document rather than using a direct drag and drop action. The reason this works is because it bypasses the code specific to the Assets tab feature . Using copy and paste causes XMetaL to use its “normal” method of interpreting what is on the clipboard.
Please also note that (as documented in the 5.5 release notes and in Help in 6.0) the Assets tab was deprecated with the 5.5 release. This means we may remove it entirely in a future release.
As people move away from XP to Vista and Windows 7 the INI setting user_setting_mode=per_user must be set in almost all cases as most people cannot log into Windows with the appropriate permissions to use user_setting_mode=default. The latter requires write permission to the C:Program Files folder and on these versions of Windows you not only need to be an admin user you most likely will also need to turn [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control]UAC[/url] off. That would be frowned upon by the IT department in most organizations.
Things are slightly easier in XP because there is no UAC feature in that version of Windows, so you just need to worry about having write permission to the Program Files folder to use this INI variable (which still might require intervention by your IT department).
If all you need to do is store bits of XML for insertion at a later time I am working on the prototype for a feature that might be a suitable replacement for that feature of the Assets tab. It does not do everything Assets can do, but it does let you store and retrieve bits of XML (what I'm calling “XML Snippets”).
It is compatible with “limited user” accounts for all versions of Windows. The UI is different from the Assets tab but it lets you select portions of a document to store for later use. Currently I have it storing them in “..My DocumentsXMetaLXML Snippets” individual files, which means they are remembered between XMetaL sessions (and even after uninstalling).
If there is interest in this please let me know as I may post a version on the forum as a demo. One might think of this feature as a clipboard that allows you to save as many items as you like for future use and select between them when pasting.
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cswieland August 25, 2009 at 2:51 pm
KGullickson October 15, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Su-Laine Yeo December 15, 2009 at 12:25 am
Derek Read January 19, 2011 at 9:11 pm
