How to Modify Your Folder or Document View Settings

By default, when you create a folder, the system automatically creates the view for it, that contains all the fields of the folder's document type. You can change the way that the information in the folders is viewed.

If you change the view settings or customize a folder, the system remembers your settings when you open the folder again. You can use the "Customize view" button on the "Documents" tab to change the number of columns, their size and other parameters.

Customizing the Appearance of a Folder

Ok, to customize the appearance of a folder, you need to select the folder in the folders tree, and then press "Customize view" button. You'll see a couple of options available. "Setup current view" will allow you to change the current appearance settings of the selected folder. But let's go ahead and create a new view by selecting "Create a new view" option.

A screen with “View settings” on it will appear. This window contains several major areas that will allow you to change the settings of the current folder view:

• Document filters - here you can specify a certain criteria to filter documents in the folder. For example, it can be documents with a certain date or time, or any other parameter.
• Categories - in this dropdown-list you can select different categories. It can be documents, dictionaries or all categories at once.
• Document fields - here you can add or remove fields, which are essentially going to be presented as a columns in the folder view.
• Preview area - this is the area where you can preview or rearrange the order in which the columns are going to appear in the folder appearance.

You also have the ability to set current view as a default view by selecting the corresponding checkbox "Set as a default view", or restore default view settings using "Restore to default" button. "Column autosize mode" option will set the same width for all the selected columns of the view. For now, simply change the name of the view and swap columns "Name" and "Date" in the preview area using your mouse, just to see how the system works. After doing that you'll see all changes in the folder view:

Modifying Column Properties

If youright-click on the name of the column in any folder, you'll see an option called "Column properties".

Here you can set a specific parameters for the columns like their color, format, width and height, alignment etc. Most of the options in this dialog are pretty self-explanatory.

If you play around with these settings, you can get the picture similar to this one:

Changing the Document View Settings

FossLook provides a number of different settings for customizing the document appearance. Each setting has it's own function. Let's look at them a little closer.

Initially document fields are grouped in alphabetical order, but if you want you can change that, simply by clicking "Document appearance settings" button in the document form, and setting up the necessary view.

Now, there's a number of things you can do here. For example, you can hide fields and tabs by clicking on their "blue eye" icons. Or you may want to change the tabs and fields order by simply dragging and dropping them into their new destination. Of course this window has "Reset to default" option, in case you want to discard all changes that you've made.

After saving some changes you've made to the document appearance you'll get a new view that looks something like this:

As you can see, all previously selected tabs and fields are hidden.

Understanding Administrator and User View Settings

Folder View Settings

The administrative customization of folder views has some peculiarities. To understand them, let's see how the system stores the views.

In FossLook each folder that stores documents has two views:

• “Administrative views”
• “User views”

If a user opens the folder and changes any setting (for example the width of a column), the system automatically creates a view for that user in the “User views” with the name “Documents” by default.

The administrator can remove individual user views by right-clicking on them and selecting "Remove", or remove all user views at once by selecting “Reset” option.

One of the things that you might want to do here is to set a view for all users of the system. In order to do that, select "Create new administrative view" option from the list. Once you do that, the new administrative view will be applied to everyone who has access to this folder.

Document View Settings

If you open any document from FossLook Administrator program, you'll see that in the view settings it has 2 options: "Private form appearance settings" and "Public form appearance settings".

Go ahead and select public settings from the list of options. You'll see the window that is pretty much the same as we discussed above, except for the additional option "Delete user settings".

This option allows you to remove all user view setting from the document.

Note: be careful when using this option, because it removes all user views for this document within the system. This action can not be undone later.

Switching Between Views in a Folder

Once you have your views setup you can easily switch between them using "Customize view" dropdown-list.

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