I can’t see a way to create a cross ref or to search for all instances of a style being used. Ideally, I would like to search, get a list of pages and widgets and open them (all or some). This is so I understand the impact of changing the style, also to find unused styles.
Any ideas?
I don’t think such a thing exists for styles, closest thing I can think of is the Usage Report function of a Master. Right-click on a master in the window and choose Usage Report to see all the pages that use it.
You may find using Masters easier than styles for making reusable elements in the long term. There’s some things, style effects for one, that are not saved in the style definition itself. So I use styles sometimes for basic styling rules, but create Masters for the shapes that use those rules.
So let’s say I have a CTA button, I define the style of its default appearance in the editor, colours, padding, mouseover effects, disabled effects, etc. Then I save it as a Master. Now I have a button shape that I can reuse across pages, it saves all the edits, not just the default appearance, and i can get reports on it. I’ve also run into issues sometimes with duplicate styles being created but I don’t recall the circumstances that can cause that, but I do know I’ve hit my head against that problem before I just made everything used more than once a Master.
What about changes to the button label? When the master is on the canvas, under the style tab, you’ll find an overrides section. On here, you can edit the labels in the master. So you can customize the button label there. Everything that has a label can be edited here (unless the label is in a dynamic panel, repeater or another master).
What about button size? My text is too short (or too long)? If you set your button to fit to width (Style tab, to the right of the height field) and give it some left and right padding, it’ll look great. In this case, I’d recommend also setting the text alignment of the label to “left”. With equal right and left padding it’ll be centered and I’ve found that there’s unintuitive behaviour when something resizes while centered.
Thank you. Yes I am using Masters and overides, and want to use them more. The problem is where one uses the same override many time on separate pages it feels like it should be a style.
It is mysterious to me that Axure haven’t nailed this properly. Especially as people must want to import their standard CSS when adopting Axure.
One other issue I am experimenting with is how to make intereactions works with Masters. For example, from Master Header, click the menu and load a menu on mobile - the issue is about calling something tyhat is a different page and I haven’t quite got that sorted yet.
Anyway, thank you for the good infor
It’s less mysterious when you consider that when Axure first came out in 2002 it was aimed at desktop application design and at that time CSS was not yet widely adopted and what was there did not necessarily conform to standards.
It’s been incrementally moving closer to the web over time. Adaptive views were a big addition that helped a bit, but there are definitely still some gaps.
What’s the issue you’re having with interactions and masters? I don’t know what you mean by “calling something that is a different page”.