Using m-Painter Versions to Restore Files

m-Painter is a popular component of m-Power for many of our developers. Developers love how easy it is for them to make changes to the HTML source without a deep understanding of the HTML language. During my conversations with customers regarding m-Painter, one question comes up time and time again: “How can I be sure that I don’t accidentally lose all of my HTML customization.”

This video tutorial will explain how you can easily retrieve past versions with m-Painter.

When developers save any change within m-Painter, it automatically will take a “snapshot” of that particular version of your HTML and make a backup of it for future use.

Here you can see that I have opened up m-Painter for a retrieval I have been working on. You’ll notice that I have made numerous changes to the page — Including painting in a header and adding in some images below. Now, I’m considering removing the m-Power logos.

Having deleted the images, I’m going to save and run the application. Seeing the app, I now want to restore my previous version as I don’t like these changes.

To restore an old copy, I simply click on File -> Versions within m-Painter. This dialog window shows all previous saved versions, the user that saved them, and the time they were saved. Any HTML files created by the compiler will have the “generated by m-Power” text next to them. Select the desired version. The page is then displayed, along me to confirm I have selected the correct version. Now all I need to do is confirm my selection and my previous version is loaded.

This feature is also extremely useful if you accidentally overwrite the HTML of an application. Once you have realized you’ve overwritten the work, simply go into m-Painter, navigate to the Versions panel and restore the correct copy.

As you can see, this feature provides m-Power developers with exceptional flexibility when it comes to customizing the HTML layer of their web application. Developers can focus their attention on building terrific apps instead of being paranoid about making incremental backups.