OL Connect 2023.1 changes the way that job and output presets are handled in the Connect Designer. Instead of saving presets in the Designer’s workspace, and requiring users to import to and export from that location, presets can now be saved in any folder, and used from any folder. This greatly simplifies working with presets, especially when they are part of a project; it is now easy to keep them along side your templates and data mappers.

Migration of presets

When you have worked with presets before, the first thing you will notice when you start the 2023.1 version of Connect Designer, is a dialog that offers to move your existing presets to a new location.

Once they are moved, you can decide if you want to keep them all in that folder or organize them differently. You can also choose to turn this folder into a versioned project, which makes it easy to share all your presets with others.

Creating new presets

The Print Presets sub menu in the File menu no longer exists. To create new presets, you can choose File/New in the menu (or click its toolbar button) or go to the New page on the Welcome screen.

In other words, to create a preset, look in the same places as you would to create a template or data mapper

Editing existing presets

To open or edit an existing preset, the same holds as for creating new ones; you can open them in the same way as the other OL Connect resources: by double-clicking in the Windows File Explorer, from the File/Open menu, the Welcome screen, or the Project Files View.

There is one exception: presets do not yet show up in the list of recently used files. Not in the File menu, nor on the Welcome screen.

Printing from Connect Designer

The print dialog in Designer allows you to pick a job and output preset to use for printing. It used to have a drop-down selection to choose these from the Designer’s workspace. This drop-down still exists, but now only shows recently used presets and three special selections: for a new preset, the default preset, and the last used settings. To select an arbitrary preset, you simply use the Browse button behind each drop-down. There’s also an Edit button that allows you to edit a selected preset without leaving the print dialog.

None of this is really new functionality, since the old print dialog allowed you to do similar things with the options that were a bit hidden away under the gear icon, but it was a bit more cumbersome to work with. For instance, you had to “import” a preset into the workspace before you could use it for printing, or modify it.

In addition to the changes needed for working with presets in other locations, we also removed unnecessary and redundant UI controls, and if a preset has a description, this is now shown directly below the drop-down.

One last detail: when you work in a versioned project, presets selected from the project are shown with a relative path. Presets from other locations are shown with a full path, to avoid confusion when you have multiple copies with the same name.

Send to Workflow, Server, and package

Connect Designer has three very similar options that help you send your configurations elsewhere: Send to Workflow, Send to Server and Package.

All three show a dialog that allows you to choose what files you want to send or package. Before version 2023.1, this dialog had a special button to allow you to pick presets from the Designer’s workspace. Now that presets live in regular folders, this is no longer needed. So that button has been removed. Just use the Browse button in that dialog to pick those presets, just as you would do for any data mappers and templates on disk that you want to send.