Overview

A skin is a series of images that is applied to the caption line, menu line, and border areas of each form to provide an enhanced look and feel to each form. The skin can also define images for most controls to further enhance the look and feel of forms.

Each base control class with the ability to define a skin has an equivalent skin class associated with it. As these classes are defined in the RootSchema, skin data is global to all schemas. See also the JadeSkinRoot and JadeSkinEntity classes in Chapter 1 of the JADE Encyclopaedia of Classes and "Maintaining Skins Using Extended Functionality", in Chapter 2 of the JADE Runtime Application Guide.

An application can set a skin that is applied to all JADE forms or controls displayed during the running of that application in the current work session. User applications can enforce a specific skin (for example, a company logo) or they can provide the user with ability to select a preferred skin that is set during the application’s initialize method (by calling the app.setSkin method).

JADE provides a collection of skins for the JADE development environment and a global collection that contains any user-defined skins for all schemas. As JADE must be able to upgrade existing systems by replacing the JADE system files, the skins used by the JADE development environment cannot be updated, and access to user-defined skins is not permitted.

Skins defined in the JADE development environment are stored in the _sysgui class map file and are therefore unavailable in user applications. Conversely, skins that you define for deployed applications are not available in the JADE development environment.

Before you can define a new skin for your applications, a picture file (for example, a .png, .bmp, .jpg, or .gif) must exist for each of the images that you want to specify.

A set of example skins is provided in the examples/skins directory. For details about loading these skins for use in your user application, see the examples/skins/readme.txt file in that directory.

JADE skins provide you with the following functionality.

The ability to define a category both for a skin and for a window (form or control). Only those windows with the same category as the skin use that skin.
The ability to provide an inactive skin for a form.
Button images for the form close, max, and min buttons showing disabled, rollover, and down states.
A global backColor property applied to all controls defined with their default three-dimensional color.
The ability to skin almost all controls other than those that already cover the entire image with other drawing. Each skin can include the:
- Type of border in terms of the border style or using eight images
- Inner image, back brush, and background color
- Foreground color
- Font
- Condition under which the skin is applied
The ability to skin the menu line, drop-down menus, and popup (context) menus, as follows.
- Type of border in terms of the borderStyle property or by using eight images
- Inner image, backBrush, or backColor
- backColor of selected items
- Menu text foreColor, selected foreColor, and disabled foreColor
- Font
- Check box, separator, and right arrow images
The ability to define the skin for an individual control.
The ability to define the skin for a control class that is applied to the controls of that type at the application level.
The ability to prevent a control or form from being skinned.