locking down a stylesheet, is it possible?

[eklisiewicz]

Hello, Is there a way to lock down a stylesheet so it cannot be overwritten except by someone with R/W privileges? We are looking at long term solutions to potentially replace an existing authoring tool, and one of our requirements is the ability to control templates. My experience with Flare in the past has been that it is easy for inexperienced users to accidentally overwrite the stylesheet. Since we would have many inexperienced users at the onset, this type of control is a concern. Any thoughts or experiences with this kind of situation? Any info is appreciated. Thank you.

Elizabeth K.

[ChoccieMuffin]

The best answer for you depends very much on how you're going to run your projects and how you're going to deal with version control.

Are you expecting to have a single common stylesheet (and page layouts and master pages and a common condition tag set and...) to be used in all of your projects? If so, then you will probably want to create a single project that contains all of these common elements and then use Global Project Linking to import those common bits into each of your projects. (We can help you with that.) You would then be able to assign Read Only in Windows Explorer, if that's how you're working.

But I suspect you're going to be using some kind of content management system (SVN, TFS, GIT, something else) so the answer may well be to do with how you manage that system and apply READ ONLY privileges to the folder that contains your global project.

Hope that is a reasonable starting point for you.

[eklisiewicz]

We will have multiple stylesheets due to legacy projects, but we will need them all to be read-only. And yes, we will be using a version control system/CMS of some kind. I am just trying to help scope out requirements and capabilities at this point. Thanks.

[SteveS]

In production you will need to use some form of version control and lock the 'baddies' out. I'd like to thing discipline and a strong work ethic would prevent people making a change once told not to, but we all know human nature better than that...

In output I think the answer is no, unless you have total control over your user's browser.

The user has the ability to assign a user stylesheet via their browser which, being 'lower' in the cascade can overwrite your styles. This is necessary for accessibility for sight impairment, it gives the user the ability to style a document so they can read it.

You might want to investigate !important, but my understanding is the rules have changed somewhat since I first learnt HTML/ CSS and its implementation has changed.

[NorthEast]

You can't lock the stylesheet, but if you import the file using a Flare project import, then users will see a warning when they try to edit or save the stylesheet file.
All of our 'template' files are imported, and marked with a coloured condition tag so they're easy to spot.

That might help a bit, as people may think about what they're doing.

And you could be draconian and periodically re-import (overwrite) the files, which will teach them a lesson.