CSS stylesheets in Lotus Connections 2.5

From Lotus Connections 2.0 to 2.5 the handling of theme and styles has been changed. While LC20 used static stylesheets, LC25 uses a specialized servlet for that purpose. This servlet called JAWR bundles multiple files and sends them compressed to the client. The HTML that is styled by this JAWR servlet refer to a normal URL, in LC25 this URL points to something like "/bundle/css/gzip_something/coreBundle.css". The context of the URL - /bundle/css - is mapped to the JAWR servlet, and the id of the bundle - /coreBundle.css - may look like file and is resolved by the servlet.. That makes it difficult, to find the proper stylesheet in the filesystem - simply, because it does not exist.

Looking at a sinlge LC25 component (i.e. Communities), the configuration file for the JAWR servlet can be found in /WEB-INF/properties.
In the configuration file, a bundle with the name "core" and the id "/coreBundle.css" is defined. The /coreBundle.css is mapped to the files

• /stylesheet/update_styles.css,
• /stylesheet/update_community.css,
• /nav/common/styles/base/core.css,
• /nav/common/styles/defaultTheme/defaultTheme.css,
• /javascript/build/dijit/themes/dijit.css,
• /nav/common/styles/base/dojo.css,
• /nav/common/styles/defaultTheme/dojoTheme.css,
• /javascript/source/lconn/comm/typeahead/themes/lconn.typeahead.css,
• /javascript/source/lconn/comm/typeahead/themes/lotusBlue/LotusBlue.css,
• /nav/common/styles/base/connectionsCore.css,
• /nav/common/styles/base/semanticTagStyles.css,
• /nav/lconn/styles/sprite-lconn.css

These files are located relative to the root of the web archive comm.web.war.

For faster development, the JAWR servlet offers a debug mode. According to the JAWR documentation the debug mode is enable by setting the jawr.debug.on=true in the jawr.properties file. The setting is applied after restarting the application.
The debug mode has two advantages:

1. changes to the css stylesheets in the filesystem are effective immediately
2. stylesheets are not included as a single, one-lined compressed file but as a set of files pointing to every single stylesheet. In the html, each mapped stylesheet is included via a separate link-tag. That way, it is transparent, which css definition is set in which stylesheet. Second, the stylesheets are not reformatted meaning that the line-numbers of tools such as firebug point to the correct line of the included stylesheet.