Creating_and_Customizing_Design

Creating and Customizing Design Themes

Using Iron Speed Designer, you can automatically create hundreds of application web pages using design themes provided with Iron Speed Designer. Design themes, also called “page styles”, provide a consistent look-and-feel shared by the page layout and the common elements used across pages such as menu bars, tables, record fields, and search, pagination and filter controls.

Following are three examples of the same Show Table page created from panels rendered with different design themes provided with Iron Speed Designer.

A Show Table page rendered with the Alps design theme.

A Show Table page rendered with the Matterhorn design theme.

A Show Table page rendered in the McKinley design theme.

Design themes are comprised of several important components:

A style sheet (.CSS cascading style sheet) defining the basic stylistic aspects of a design theme, such as the fonts, colors, and table styles.
A set of panels containing HTML and code generation tags that encapsulate useful functionality, such as a set of record fields or a table display.
Images for buttons, thumbnails, and other purely graphic elements used in the design theme.

To understand design themes, it’s important to first understand the basic process by which web pages are created using Iron Speed Designer.

Panels	Layout Pages	ASPX Pages
Provided with Iron Speed Designer Can be provided by the developer	Created by the developer or by Iron Speed Designer’s Application Wizard. Typically contain one or more panels.	Created by Iron Speed Designer from layout pages.
Contain HTML, code generation tags & special code generation tags used by Iron Speed Designer to automatically create layout pages	Contain HTML & code generation tags	Contain HTML & databound .NET controls in place of code generation tags
Frequently used to create C/R/U/D pages for records and tables.

Panels – Panels are portions of a web page – chunks of HTML – that encapsulate functionality such as displaying a group of fields from a database record, displaying a tabular listing of rows, or a navigation menu. Panels usually contain standard code generation tags that are replaced when the application is built.

Layout Pages – These HTML pages are used by Iron Speed Designer to build the application’s final ASPX pages when generating the application. Layout pages include code generation tags that are replaced with references to .NET controls when the application code is written.

ASPX Pages – Created by Iron Speed Designed, these “Active Server Pages” are used by the server to dynamically create and display pages requested by an end user’s browser.

Creating and Customizing Design Themes

See Also