Customizing JMS Postcard

 

Normally JMS Postcard uses standard Java™ Swing settings for font size and background color. But if it detects a postcard.ini file on startup, JMS Postcard uses settings specified in this file instead. We can also change the trace setting.

Edit the sample file postcard.ini in the bin directory of the WebSphere MQ classes for Java installation and set your preferred settings for font size, and screen foreground and background colors.

The precise use of upper and lower case letters in the keywords, as in the following examples, must be strictly observed when you set these properties.

Set screen colors

By setting the Background and Foreground properties, we can change the background and foreground colors of controls used in the Postcard application.

Background=000000
Foreground=FFFFFF

This example selects white text on a black background. The values represent intensity levels for red, green, and blue colors using a hexadecimal scale from 00 to FF. Other examples of colors are FF0000 (bright red), 00FF00 (bright green) and 0000FF (bright blue).

Set font size

MinimumFont=20

This example selects a minimum font size of 20 points. Any value smaller than 13 is ignored.

Using an external browser for online help

WebBrowser=nautilus

This setting is only applicable on non-Windows systems. The internal browser used for displaying online help information cannot be customized. This setting allows you to identify an alternative browser.

Tracing the Postcard application

Trace=1

Set this to start trace output. Note that the trace output is sent to the trc subdirectory of the directory defined by the MQ_JAVA_DATA_PATH system environment variable. If the application cannot write to this directory, trace output is directed to the system console.

We can also use the MQJMS_TRACE_LEVEL parameter on the java command line to start tracing. See Tracing programs for more about tracing applications.

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