You may have learned a thing or two about Styles in Alventis from the previous chapters on Record Styles, the Style Picker, and Memo formatting. Here, we will discover how you can manipulate all these Styles directly.

The Style Explorer form is depicted below.

We said "form" and not "dialog" on purpose. The Style Explorer can remain open while you work in some other form in Alventis. You can close it when you don't need it any more.

The Style Explorer is quite straightforward. At the very top you find the DataNav bar that should be familiar to you from the InfoView chapter. It lets you navigate between Styles of the Database (that you'll select in a moment). Styles are treated here just like data records, so if you know how to use an InfoView, there should be no surprises for you here.

Right underneath it is the Database combo box. Styles in Alventis are considered part of the Database whose record(s) they are applied to. This combo box allows you to choose which Database's styles you want to explore.

The remaining controls essentially comprise the individual Style itself.

Style ID is just a unique style order number automatically assigned at the time of its creation (just like a data record's ID).

Created is the style's creation date.

Style Name gives you an opportunity to name the style any way you want for identification purposes. This name is your "personal" name for the style, i.e., it is not visible to other users, if any. The Style Name has more importance than we just led you to believe though. It tells Alventis that this style has some "special meaning" for you and should therefore be preserved for posterity – even if it is not currently applied to any data records. Alventis only preserves styles that are either currently applied to at least one record or that you have explicitly named. This is where you do so. It is only these preserved styles that will appear in the Style Picker when you launch Alventis.

Note that while unnamed styles are displayed in the Search Results grid as "Unnamed #123" or similar (123 being the Style ID in case you haven't guessed), these "fake" names are not listed in the Style Explorer.

Note also that the fact that a style may be "used" somewhere in Memo text does not play any role and won't make such styles preserved. The text in the Memo remains stylized of course, but the style will not appear in the Style Explorer or the Style Picker.

The rest of the controls look and work almost exactly like their counterparts in the Font dialog box, so please refer to that chapter if you have some doubts. You can use them to modify an existing style or create a brand new one.