Creating an iOS Extended Theme

An Extended Theme inherits another Theme’s UI components and behavior, but lets you add to or alter it by extending the parent Theme’s View class and creating a new XIB file. An Extended Theme’s parent must be a Full Theme. The Flat7 Theme is an Extended Theme.

These steps explain how to create an Extended Theme:

1. In Xcode, create a new XIB file named after the Screenlet’s View class and your Theme. By convention, an XIB file for a Screenlet with a View class named FooScreenletView and a Theme named BarTheme must be named FooScreenletView_barTheme.xib. You can use the XIB file of your parent Theme as a template. Build your UI changes in your new XIB file with Interface Builder.

   

   Figure 1: This example Extended Theme's XIB file extends the Login Portlet's UI and behavior with a switch that lets the user show or hide the password field value.

2. Create a new View class that extends the parent Theme’s View class. You should name this class after the XIB file you just created. You can add or override functionality of the parent Theme’s View class.

3. Set your new View class as the custom class for your Theme’s XIB file. If you added @IBOutlet or @IBAction actions, bind them to your class.

Well done! You can optionally package your Theme and/or start using it.

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