Managing the application setting in Expression Web4

Hi guys, I appreciate your keen interest in Expression Studio and thus brings up to you a new article in Expression Web 4. In this article you will be learning how to change the application settings in Expression Web 4. Hope you would be familiar with the application settings while working with ASP.NET. The thing is same here only the platform changes. Further more, this platform is quite smarty to work with as you are handed with much easier IDE that you have to spend less time in your application as compared to that in other platform.

So without sparing time lets start with the application setting, follow the steps below:

Step 1 : First of all open a site from the storage drive. In this article I will be using the site created in my previous article. You can open this site by clicking on the Site menubar and selecting open site.

Step 2 : Then after opening the site go to Tools-->Application Options. The figure below will assist you for this.

Step 3 : After you select the Application options from the Tools menu a window opens up as shown below and has four tabs named :

1. General

2. Configure Editors

3. Report Views

4. FTP

Step 4 : Looking at the General tab. This tab is opened by default as the window opens. This tab has main three options i.e.

(i) Start up : This option shows the major properties that the Expression Web4 would load on the starting of the application. This option has two main check boxes to deal with.

a. Open last site automatically when Expression Web starts :- The picture is clear from the line that if the user wants Expression Web would to open the site automatically that he worked recently upon, every time the Expression Web is initiated. By default this option is checked, you can uncheck it if you want to.

b. Check If Expression Web Is The Default Editor For Pages :- This option is also checked by default and is not of much importance so uncheck this option. Checking this option will prompt the user every time to make Expression Web their default Editor and this is very irritating so uncheck this option.

(ii) General : This is the other option under the General tab. In this option there are two checkbox options. These options are:

a. Use your current windows color scheme :- This check box is unchecked by default and is of less bothering as there is nothing to do with color schemes while focusing over application creation. Still funky user can check this option to allow color changes.

b. Show the status bar :- This is the next option and checked by default. Checking this option allows you to view the status bar in the application at the bottom right corner. The figure below will make it more clear.

Another option you see in the General category is the proxy setting button. Click on this button and a Internet Properties window opens up.

This is actually the internet property of the operating system and through this you can change these properties as per your requirement, suppose the application in Expression Web is not running in the browser then you can check and configure the Internet properties from here. You can add or connect to another network or vice versa. This is where this setting is useful.

(iii) PHP : This option has a browse button that is to set the PHP executable path for the application in this. while making the application in PHP you can select the path where those applications will be stored from here.

Step 5 : Now switching to the next tab Configure Editors. When you select this tab all you get is the list of extensions and the respective Editors for their editing. This is very useful when you want to change the default editor for opening a file in the application.

In this dialog box there are three options on the extension side and two on the editor side. The fig will show it more clearly.

On the Extension side you see:

1: Add new Extension

2: Modify Extension

3: Delete Extension

On the Editor side you see

1: Add new Editor

2: Delete Editor

Now lets see how it works. Click on the add new extension button and the below window opens up. Type "img" in the text box.

Now on pressing OK you will see that "img" is added to the Extension List. Now add new editor and select it for this "img" Extension (for example here I have selected Adobe Image Ready)

Now it is done. This means whenever you will open a file with extension "img" It will be opened with Adobe Image ready editor. This is how it works. You can also browse for other editors in the storage drive.

Step 7 : The next tab is Report View. Select this tab and you find the following options.

• Recent files are less than
   
• Older files are more than
   
• Slow pages take at least
   
• Assume connection speed of

And a check box showing.

Display gridlines when viewing reports

All these are the options for setting the time duration or speed of the files or pages being used in the application. You can change these as per your requirement.

Step 8 : Last tab is the FTP tab. select this and you will find that there is a textbox which is for adding a new extensions to the list of previously defined list of extensions. You can add or remove any new extension you encounter in the application that needs to be added in the list. see the figure below.

Hope you enjoyed this article and learned adjusting the application setting in Expression Web.