How to Do I Recompile the StyleSheet for the Main Site?

There are times when a site requires a global change in the style sheet and adding a custom style sheet to all activities is not a feasible solution. The alternative is to amend the style sheet as required and then to recompile these into the main assembly and then to deploy this assembly to the bin folder of the website.

Answer

1. Amend the stylesheet as required
2. Navigate to the following folder on the web server: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\[site url]\transform (or the equivalent if the default installation was not used)
   • ActivityDisplay.xsl – is used to display the interactive forms
   • history.activity.xsl – is used to display the history pages
   • ObjectTemplates.xsl – contains all the generic definitions for the objects and form layouts
3. Open a Visual Studio Command Prompt and navigate to the folder where those files are stored
4. Execute the following from the command line:

xsltc.exe /settings:script+,DTD+,document+ /class:ActivityTransform ActivityDisplay.xsl  /class:ActivityHistory history.activity.xsl /out:ActivityTransformations.dll

5. The result will be three files created in the same location:
   • ActivityTransformations.dll
   • ActivityTransformations.script1.dll
   • ActivityTransformations.script2.dll
6. Backup the above three files from the site in question and then replace with the newly generated files. The changes will now be in effect.