Symptom

V5.1 includes portals that support different types of users:

• Developer - provides an integrated work, test, and development environment to support application developers.
• User - supports application managers and users when entering, updating, and resolving work objects. User portals may be customized to reflect the terminology, layout, facilities, and styles appropriate to each user community.

In the User portal, when using the Classic (V4.2) portal with the Classic skin, table alignment issues appear when presenting a map value rule:

You may also experience smaller HTML issues similar to this in other rule forms.

This issue is due to changes in rule forms for V5.X that depend on style sheet updates associated with the Developer skin. When you use the Classic portal and Classic skin, these style sheet changes are not available to you.

Solution

There are two ways to address this alignment issue. The first is recommended.

1. Always use the Developer portal to update rules.

Ensure developers are using the Developer portal. This issue does not arise with the Developer portal.

However, if you have upgraded from V4.2 , your developers or other users that modify rules, may already be accustomed to the Classic portal.

2. Update the Classic portal to use the V5 style sheet for rules.

This workaround involves referencing the Developer style sheet in a Classic skin rule. Thus, developers or other users making rule changes when using a Classic portal, are using a style sheet appropriate to V5 rule forms.

Procedure

Follow the steps below to resolve HTML style issues when modifying rules using the Classic skin:

1. From the Rules by Type Explorer, select User Interface > Portal to display a list of Portal rule instances.
2. Select the Portal record developers are using and check out the rule.
3. From the portal rule, open the skin rule using the Open button next to the Skin field. If a skin is not specified, create a new one, for example named DeveloperClassic.
   
   NOTE: If the Skin field is empty, this indicates that the Classic skin rule is being used. The rule is marked as final and cannot be modified.
4. In the Skin form, set the Rule field to reference the text rule css/rulesformstyle_metal. Do not modify other fields.
5. Save the Skin form.
6. Save the Portal form.