Customizing Default Options

Oxygen XML Author has an extensive set of options that you can configure. When Oxygen XML Author in installed, these options are set to default values. You can provide a different set of default values for an installation using an options file.

Creating an options file

To create an options file:

You may wish to use a fresh install for this procedure, to make sure that you do not copy personal option settings to the group.
Open Oxygen XML Author and open the Preferences dialog box.
Go through the options and set them to the desired defaults. Make sure that you are setting global options, not project options in each page.
Close the Preferences dialog box.
Go to Options > Export Global Options and create an XML options file.
Go to back to the main preferences page and click Export Global Options to create an options file.

If you want to control exactly which options page will be stored in the default options file, you can choose to attach them to a project file (.xpr file extension) by following these steps:

In the Project view create a project or open an already existing one.
Switch to Project Options each Preferences page which contains settings of interest to you. All explicitly set values will be saved in the project file after you press either of the OK or Apply buttons.
Note: Some pages do not have the Project Options switch, since the options they host might contain sensitive data (like passwords, for example), unsuitable for sharing with other users.

Note: If you store the options to a project file (.xpr file extension) the file extension must be preserved as such (xpr) when the configuration file is distributed to other users.

Providing Default Option Values

Use either one of the following ways to configure an Oxygen XML Author installation to use customized default options from an XML configuration file:

Set the path to the options file as the value of the com.oxygenxml.default.options system property.
The path must be specified with an URL or a file path relative to the application installation folder:
```
-Dcom.oxygenxml.default.options=options/default.xml
```
Note: If you are using the Java Webstart distribution, edit the .jnlp file that launches the application and set the com.oxygenxml.default.options parameter using a property element, for example:
```
 <property name="oxy:com.oxygenxml.default.options" value="http://host/path/to/default-options.xml"/>
```
In the [OXYGEN_DIR] installation folder, create a folder called preferences. Copy the options file in the [OXYGEN_DIR]/preferences folder.
Note: The same procedure applies to a Java Webstart distribution.

Note: Make sure that the options configuration file has either the .xml extension (for example: default-options.xml) or an .xpr extension depending on the way in which it was created (from the global options or saved at project level).