MCS editors

MCS policy editors vary somewhat in appearance, but they share some common features described here.

When you add a new resource to a project, MCS opens the first page of the policy editor for the type of policy you have selected. From that point on you can open an MCS editor on that resource from the project policy tree.

There are policy editors for

Asset groups
Policies
Devices
Layouts
Themes

Editor pages

Some editors have a single page. Others have multiple pages, in which case the first page is an Overview. For example, the Layout editor has two pages, the Theme editor has three pages, and the Device Repository editor contains four pages.

Alerts and Action items

When you use a policy editor in MCS, you are creating or editing an underlying XML file. Each time you complete an entry in the editor, the content is validated against the XML schema for the resource.

When the resource you are editing is validated, MCS automatically logs problems, errors, or warnings in the Problems view. See Validation for details. The Alerts and Action Items section of an editor also reports on the current status of the resource you are editing.

Device categories

In the Attributes section of Policy, Layout and Theme editors there is a Device category policy dropdown control that you can use to associate a device category scheme with an entire policy. The category schemes include all the device policies that allow a singe selection to be made from a set of values.

You can also add custom device policies to this list. For more information refer to Custom device policies.

Editing XDIME 2 documents

The built-in XDIME 2 editor helps page authors to create XDIME 2 documents more efficiently and eliminates common mistakes by providing the content assist and XML and XDIME validation mechanisms.

Editing resources

You can have multiple MCS editors opened on different resource tabs at any time, and the resources may be from more than one project. You can navigate between editors by clicking on an editor tab at the beginning of the editor page, or double-clicking an icon in the policy tree. Each tab contains the file name of the resource you are editing.

In the policy tree and on the editor tabs, each resource type is associated with an icon that helps you identify it. The file extension also identifies the type of resource.

Resource	Icon	File extension
Asset group		mgrp
Audio		mauc
Binding policy		mbnd
Device repository		mdpr
Image		mimg
Layout		mlyt
Link		mlnk
Rollover image		mrlv
Script		mscr
Text		mtxt
Theme		mthm
XDIME 2 file		xdime, xdinc

Note:

Unless otherwise stated, audio (.mauc), link (.mlnk), rollover image (.mdyv) and text (.mtxt) policies are not supported in XDIME 2.

Collaborative projects

In projects where you have enabled collaborative working, additional controls are displayed in the editors, so that you can lock and unlock either entire policies or individual policy variants.

Default editor

Like all workbench editors, MCS uses the most recently used editor to open a file, so if you opened a file with a text editor for example, MCS will use it next time you double click on the resource. To change the default, right-click on a resource and choose the specific MCS editor for that file type.

Right-click on a policy in the policy tree and choose Open with
Now choose the MCS editor for the policy

You can also double-click on the policy in the policy tree.