Original Article Date: Jan 1, 2008

With thanks to Van Woods for this contribution that discusses a customized report generated by the Standards Checker.

MicroStation V8 introduced a utility to compare levels, text styles, dimension styles, element templates and line style properties in selected design files to established standards. The Standards Checker can be run on individual design files or be run as a batch process against multiple files. In addition you can run this utility interactively or generate a report showing which files were processed, the standards that were checked, and the problems encountered.

The report file is written as an XML file that requires an XML style sheet to transform the data into a readable format for displaying in a web browser.

By default MicroStation will use the following XML style sheet:
...\workspace\system\data\standardschecker.xsl which produces the following report style.

Although the default report is quite usable, CAD Administrators may want to create a customized style sheet and specify it's location with the variable MS_STANDARDSCHECKER_STYLESHEET.

For example, customizing the style sheet can produce a report that looks like this:

In this example, the report uses a custom style sheet that:

- Adds the corporate logo and name in the title.
- Hyperlinks on the file names for easy access.
- Uses a friendlier colour palette for printing.
- Toggles the Expand All button to reveal all data included in the report.

These changes simplifies the usage of the report and minimizes the training required since there is no hidden data.

To see how these changes were made, open and study the contents of the customized XSL file: http://www.askinga.com/askingapics/320CorpsStandardsChecker.xsl The sections that were changed are easily recognizable by comments that are added. It may also be helpful to compare the contents of the customized style sheet to that of the default one MicroStation uses.

Note: XSL files are text based and can be edited with any text editor. Although Notepad can be used for quick simple edits, it does not know that you are writing XML. By using a dedicated XML Editor, you'll be forced to write valid XML which will result in error-free XML documents.

For more information on editing style sheets the following is a good resource: http://www.w3schools.com

AskInga Article #320