My project has multiple themes with different colors.
I need to skin certain textboxes with a specific font/size/etc.[no color difference]
Currently, I add <asp:TextBox SkinID="skinned" runat="server".../> to all .skin files under each theme.
Is there a way to put this textbox skin in one place, like a master skin?
The lack of inheritance or cascading in the ASP.NET Themes implementation is an unfortunate limitation that doesn't receive a lot of attention. In scenarios where you wish to have a global skin available to all themes (without changing the control definition itself), you have two options:
Option #1: Use a VirtualPathProvider
(The downside of this is that you can't use it on precompiled websites without a reflection-based workaround.)
You can define a Global.skin file under a special Global theme where shared skins are kept; you will also create a placeholder Global.skin file under all other themes as well:
App_Themes
- Global
\Global.skin (primary)
- ThemeA
\Global.skin (empty placeholder)
- ThemeB
\Global.skin (empty placeholder)
In the VirtualPathProvider you would then re-route all requests for App_Themes\*\Global.skin to App_Themes\Global\Global.skin.
Option #2: Use a Post-Build Task
This is an amendment to the above solution that avoids the precompiled websites limitation; instead of doing the re-route at runtime, you can apply it post-build via an ms-build task that simply propagates Global\Global.skin to all other theme folders.
I've used both options successfully.
You will need to list it under each theme, but you only need to list one control definition per theme. If you want a skin to be the default behavior for a control, specify the definition without a SkinID property.
Related
We want to distribute our .NET Themes out to edge of the Cloud.
However, my research through Google and Help files tells me that ASP.NET Themes (App_Themes) must be served from a physical sub-folder of the web server folder or an IIS virtual directory; ergo: Themes cannot be served from a CDN (we are currently using AWS). This seems a major failing and I hope that I am just going to get flamed for not researching properly, but I have to ask:
Does someone know of a way of serving ASP.NET Themes from a different server (and URI) than the web application that uses the Themes?
(Windows Azure could be a possibility, if it is a/the_only way to achieve this.)
Using themes and skins you primarily style server controls. Then it doesn't make sense to have theme files in CDN, since they are processed by the server.
Themes vs. Cascading Style Sheets
Themes are similar to cascading style sheets in that both themes and style sheets define a set of common attributes that can be applied
to any page. However, themes differ from style sheets in the following
ways:
Themes can define many properties of a control or page, not just style properties. For example, using themes, you can specify the
graphics for a TreeView control, the template layout of a GridView
control, and so on.
Themes can include graphics.
Themes do not cascade the way style sheets do. By default, any property values defined in a theme referenced by a page's Theme
property override the property values declaratively set on a control,
unless you explicitly apply the theme using the StyleSheetTheme
property. For more information, see the Theme Settings Precedence
section above.
Only one theme can be applied to each page. You cannot apply multiple themes to a page, unlike style sheets where multiple style
sheets can be applied.
Source: ASP.NET Themes and Skins
My goal is to have more themes for my application and if possible, bundle them with the application itself, not load them at runtime using IStyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations().
Using the theme command-line option, you can have more than one "compile-time theme" bundled with your application according to docs:
theme filename [...] Specifies a list of theme files to use with this application. Theme files can be SWC files with CSS files inside them or CSS files.
However, I wasn't able to find an example how to actually do that (use the += syntax on command line?) and switch between those themes at runtime. What API should I use?
Using the theme command-line option, you can have more than one
"compile-time theme" bundled with your application according to docs:
Yes, You can add additional themes using the += in your command line.
I do exactly this for the Flextras mobile demos; including both the generic Spark theme with the Mobile theme to create the app.
However, both themes will be attempted to be used. I believe the second takes precedence. That means for every class where you want to use the "other theme" you have to specify that theme be used manually. This could get pretty complex very quickly; and you'll have to re-create a lot of spark skins in your application. I've done some work for a client around this who wanted to use our mobile DropDownList in both their normal application and in a mobile application from the same code base. I think the appropriate skin is conditionally applied at runtime using CSS; however we had to create a skin for the "non-mobile use" that explicitly specified the non-mobile skins for the individual elements (Such as the scroll bars)
Is it possible to create a default theme for an ASP.NET Website?
For example, If I had a theme called "Default", and ive selected a theme called "NewTheme" and I referenced a file which doesn't exist in the "NewTheme" but does exist in the "Default" theme like:
<asp:image id="img" runat="server" ImageUrl="~/Images/image.jpg" />
Could that then be taken from "/App_Themes/Default/Images/image.jpg" if it does not exist at "/App_Themes/NewTheme/Images/image.jpg"?
Furthermore if a CSS class didn't exist in "NewTheme", but it did in "Default", then could it take the "Default"? In fact, I think it would be better if it first took all the default styles, and then overrides any that "NewTheme" have which clashes.
I know Global References work similar to this because if ive selected "es" localization, and a key doesn't exist in the webreference.resx.es file but it does in webreference.resx, then itll take the value from there.
I think this would be important functionality for ASP.NET Themes as I can imagine different themes only having certain images changed, and certain styles changed. I can't imagine every image and every style always being totally different for each Theme. And therefore without this functionality, its going to be a case of duplicating styles/images, which I'm not a fan of (for obvious reasons!).
Default themes as you describe aren't supported by ASP.NET. There are regular Themes and StyleSheetThemes, but changing them dynamically is more useful at the Page request level than for individual Controls or static files.
You can code up your own version of themes for static files using URL rewriting or routing -- but then it's not really Themes any more.
For controls like <asp:Image>, you could override them and modify properties such as ImageUrl based on which files exist in some hierarchy of "theme" folders. Then use tag mapping to replace all instances of that control with the new one, without requiring any markup changes.
FWIW, the BeginRequest event in Global.asax is only invoked for dynamic files in IIS (Cassini calls it for statics, too). To support statics in IIS, you'll need an HttpModule, and you'll also need to configure IIS to run in Integrated mode.
This functionality isn't built into ASP.NET. Nevertheless, you could implement it fairly easily:
Hook the HttpApplication.BeginRequest event in Global.asax or in a custom HTTP module.
Look for requests with URLs under "/App_Themes/NewTheme/".
Check whether the file at HttpRequest.PhysicalPath exists.
If the file doesn't exist, call HttpContext.RewritePath and replace "NewTheme" in the request URL with "Default".
We have a ASP.NET solution using images, css and .skin files with in the App_Theme/{selected theme}. The themes today contains many, many files and images and for a customer theme we add a new folder to the App_Themes and copy all files to the new folder and make the 10-200 changes on images, skin and css's.
The issue here is that the default theme, the one we normally have when we develop, evolve's and grows making theme customer theme out of date. So when an upgrade comes we have to go through all files looking for changes and hopefully finding them all. Sometimes we miss things that are really important.
The perfect solution would be to have a base theme that contains the base css, skin and images. And when we add a new customer theme we only tell the system what has been changed, what css-selectors to override and what images to use instead of the images from the base theme. In my understanding, if using the normal ASP.NET theme functionality in App_Themes folder, you can only have ONE theme and not a BASE theme and then say a DeliveryCustomer-theme that has a different background and some other images that the solution shall use instead of the ones in the BASE-theme.
Does anyone have some guidelines to solve this in a maintainable way for the future. I seen that people override the App_Theme path to make it work with custom skins.
thanks!
Use the concept of a base theme like you described. Pull out all common CSS rules into another file, let's call it base.css.
Take base.css and all the images that are common, and put them in a folder outside of App_Themes, and just include the CSS file like you normally would any other on your master page.
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/styles/base.css" /> <!-- Note this isn't in app_themes -->
Then, make sure your CSS files in various themes only specify the delta for your styles.
Ok, so here is how I'v done it know.
I have created a Default theme that is the original theme with all the css-files, skin-files and images that is needed, and that is alot. This theme is in the App_Themes folder. Them I'v created a new folder called ThemeSkins next to the App_Themes folder. In this folder I have all the new skins in different folders. The folders name is the name of the new theme that one want's to have. In each of the skin folders there are css-files that contains only the selectors that I want to overload. There is also images that I want to replace.
I have created a ThemeCreator tool that does three things:
Remove all themes except the Default theme in the App_Themes folder. This is to only have one main theme to work on for the developers. There will still be work that needs to be done in the ThemeSkins, but the overall work load will be minimal.
Next the tool looks at the folders that is in ThemeSkins and creates a folder under App_Themes for each skin with its name. Then it copies the Default theme into all the new skin folders that it just created.
The last thing is that it will merge the skin specific files into the newly created skin under App_Themes and let the user know what files were added just for information. The tool adds a prefix, "z_", on all css-files so that these are loaded last of all css-files and there for will overload the default selectors.
The thing that remains is to update the skin-files, so far, no customer has needed changes in these files. But when they do, I guess I just add a skin files and have to update the default in a automatic way since the skin-markers can't be overloaded as css-selectors can.
This works really smooth and gives us a nice and lean way to work with skins on our themes.
Any one got a better idea how to get the same result? the major issue using ASP.NET themes are that you can't use a default theme and then just apply skins to it without using the shape and color attribute in the skin-files. This is not recommended as the skin files will copy out all attribute to all the places that they are needed in the markup and not just reference them as css-classes do.
I am writing asp.net website which will going to be host on public network. I don't have very much knowledge about AppTheme specially utilizing theme, css and skin in asp.net 2.0.
Previously i have worked with asp and asp.net 1.0 where i only write css class and write attribute class="***" inside every control where i want to have css.
I don;'t know whether this is right practice with asp.net 2.0 because in asp.net 2.0 we have advance features like theme and skins.
So can i have help from you so that i can use theme, css and skin in best way . Also i would like to know how different is using css with asp.net 2.0 AS COMPARE WITH PREVIOUS VERSION.
Themes are made up of a set of elements: skins, cascading style sheets (CSS), images, and other resources. At a minimum, a theme will contain skins. Themes are defined in special directories in your Web site or on your Web server.
Here are some links from MSDN that will help you get started:
ASP.NET Themes and Skins Overview
How to: Define ASP.NET Page Themes
How to: Apply ASP.NET Themes
How to: Apply ASP.NET Themes Programmatically
Walkthrough: Creating User-Selectable Themes
Also, I would recommend Scott Allens article on Themes In ASP.NET 2.0 for a quick overview and some samples:
http://www.odetocode.com/articles/423.aspx
Your work shouldn't change that much (if you're working with a single theme).
Your CSS classes will stay as they are at the moment - they'll be used on the client side
You'll add skin files to your theme - these are used for server control style settings
The main difference is that you're able to define several different themes at the same time. Otherwise it depends on you how simple your HTML is. The best way is to not include any style information inside your ASPX files. You should use only use classes. Everything else should be styled within your CSS files.
Oh and BTW: all your CSS files within your App_Themes/Theme folder will be automagically added to your pages. You don't have to explicitly add them to your Master/Aspx page.