Overview

The functionality documented in this section and its subsections was superseded from JADE release 6.0, and is retained for backward compatibility. For details about the enhanced skin functionality that enables you to define a category both for a skin and for a window (at the application, form, or control level), see "Maintaining Skins Using Extended Functionality", later in this document.

Your JADE systems can contain JADE skins, which are a series of images that are 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 button, check box, and option button controls to further enhance the appearance of forms.

By default, skins are not used in runtime applications but the developer of the application can specify and select the skin that is applied to all JADE forms displayed during the running of that application in the current work session.

You can use JADE skins in applications to enforce a specific skin (for example, a company logo, and so on) or the initialization of the runtime application can provide users with the ability to select a preferred skin that is set during the application’s initialize method (by calling app.setSkin).

The global collection of skins is available to all runtime applications in all systems in your JADE database. In addition, you can enable runtime users to define or maintain JADE skins that you have provided or you can enable them to select from the global collection of skins. For details, see "Defining and Maintaining JADE Skins" or "Selecting a Skin to Use at Run Time", respectively.

As references to skins information is contained in the _usergui.dat system schema file, when the ReadOnlySchema parameter in the [JadeClient] or [JadeServer] section of the JADE initialization file is set to true, skins cannot be loaded.

For details about extracting JADE skins for runtime applications from your JADE development environment, see "Specifying Your Schema Options" under "Extracting Your Schema", in Chapter 10 of the JADE Development Environment User’s Guide.