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CXTPTabControl and Office 2007 NormalAqua colors |
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MacW 
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Joined: 26 June 2007 Status: Offline Points: 253 |
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 Topic: CXTPTabControl and Office 2007 NormalAqua colorsPosted: 30 March 2008 at 1:58pm |
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Hi,
When I use xtpTabAppearancePropertyPage2007 to set the appearance of a CXTPTabControl the colors are apparently always as in the NormalBlue color set of the Office 2007 skin. How I can I set the tab control to use the NormalAqua color set? |
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Oleg
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Joined: 21 May 2003 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 11234 |
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Posted: 31 March 2008 at 1:00am |
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Hi,
You need include Styles\Office2007Aqua\Office2007Aqua.rc resource instead of Blue.
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Oleg, Support Team
CODEJOCK SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS |
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MacW
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Joined: 26 June 2007 Status: Offline Points: 253 |
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Posted: 31 March 2008 at 10:50am |
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Hi, Oleg
I'm at a loss here. Is there any documentation somewhere about how you want to us to use this? There are skins, and themes, and your sample projects you call a wild mix of functions like SetImageHandle(hModule, _T("OFFICE2007SILVER.INI")) or SetDockingPaneTheme(xtpPaneThemeOffice2007) or GetToolTipContext()->SetStyle(xtpToolTipOffice2007) or m_wndScrollBar[SB_HORZ].SetScrollBarStyle(xtpScrollStyleOffice2007Dark) All this seems a bit complex to me. When to use what and in which order? Do I need to call something to make my control bars take on the Office skin? The toolbars? The scroll bars? Docking Panels? Dialog Boxes? I attempted to use XTPSkinManager()->LoadSkin(...Office2007.cjstyles) in my application to use the Office2007 look if the user wants to, but apparently this does not switch all of the XTP controls into Office2007 mode? The dialog boxes look OK, and the buttons also take the Aqua look when I use the ...Aqua.INI file with the LoadSkin. But tab controls don't use the skin, and toolbars also look strange. If LoadSkin does not work for all controls, I can include the .RC file as you outline in your reply. But which functions do I have to call to make this work, and even switchable between Aqua and Silver and Blue and Black? I've checked the XTP User Guide which does not mention any of this, and I've also checked the Reference Guide, which only has the usual one-liners like "LoadSkin -> Loads a Skin". There is no documentaton about which theme or skin functions to use to make it work, and the samples are no help here either. There are so many "Office2007"-related method calls in the samples, and not further documentation about why you use that function, and what it does, and how it relates to other functions.. Can you please name the method calls I need to use to make the Office2007 skin or theme work with all controls? And with the different color sets you provide? |
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Smucker
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Joined: 02 February 2008 Status: Offline Points: 156 |
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Posted: 31 March 2008 at 11:27am |
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I agree that it's confusing. The CXTP Themes and Styles apply directly to things painted directly by CodeJock, while Skins apply to everything.
For skins, you can use any .msstyles files as well as the .cjstyles provided by Codejock. To apply a consistent skin to everything, set the themes/styles to defaults. The thing that probably bugs me the most is that there are different themes/styles for different CJ items, rather than a consistent set used by everything. I'm narrowing things down to just a few choices for my users unless they choose to use a custom skin. |
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Product: Xtreme Toolkit Pro version 13.2 (Unicode, static build)
Platform: Windows 200x/XP/Vista/Win7 (32/64 bit) Language: Visual C++ 9.0 (Studio 2008) |
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Oleg
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Joined: 21 May 2003 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 11234 |
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Posted: 01 April 2008 at 1:34am |
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Hi,
PropertyPage2007 doesn't use SkinFramework - it uses Office2007 bitmaps that you include to your resource file.
See res\app.rc2 file in these samples.
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Oleg, Support Team
CODEJOCK SOFTWARE SOLUTIONS |
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MacW
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Joined: 26 June 2007 Status: Offline Points: 253 |
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Posted: 01 April 2008 at 5:21am |
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I'm not talking about a property page here, Oleg.
I want to make your skinning / theme technology work in my application for all controls. As I explained in my initial post, the skin I have set for the application is not used for the CXTPTabControl, for example. I hence asked for advice how to make this work. Since your help files are no help, and your samples use so many skin/theme related functions without any further comment on how to use these functions, I stuck for days now. When I use for example
some parts of my dialog-based test application get the aqua look, e.g. dialog boxes, buttons and the like. But not the CXTPTabControl. Even when I load the "Styles\Office2007Aqua\Office2007Aqua.rc" resources, the tab control looks different than the rest of the application. See screen shot 1 below:  Since I'm not really interested in Aqua, I tried to use the "black" skin/theme. But I failed again. I can include the "black" resources so the XTPTabCtrl takes a black look, but how to I enable the black Office2007 skin for the test of my application (e.g. what is the .INI name to use with LoadSkin for the black Office2007 theme, or is there none?? All I can get so far is:  This is LoadSkin Office2007 with "NormalBlack.ini" and inclusion of "Styles\Office2007Black\Office2007Black.rc" in the resource file. The application is not skinned at all as it appears, but at least the tab control looks "black". I can get it to work only by using the default "blue" skin. I don't want this skin, but at least it works:  This is the result I get by loading LoadSkin with "Office2007.cjstyles" without any additional parameter (.ini file), and also including the "Office2007Blue.rc" resources to color the tab control. So my code seems to work in principle, at least most of it. Again, my question: How to I "skin" my application to get the black or aqua Office2007 look everywhere? Please answer as detailed as possible, because I've lost several days over this already and I'm not that smart. I need to get this simple stuff working so I can go on. |
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MacW
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Posted: 05 April 2008 at 8:50am |
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Any comment on this? I'm still looking for a solution that makes XTP theming work...
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adrien
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Joined: 30 April 2007 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 449 |
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Posted: 05 April 2008 at 1:12pm |
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Hi
It took me a while to get my head around this as well. the differnence between themes and skins is initially confusing, but as Smucker said, there are basically 2 technologies due to the way the system paints things.
Things like dialog controls, window frames, tab controls, list controls, tree controls etc are normally painted by the OS. To change the way the OS paints these, the CJ skin framework inserts a windows hook to handle painting itself of OS-created objects. This is a skin.
For things that are custom controls of CJ, these are already just painted by the CJ code, so there's no skinning. The exception to this seems to be if you use Office2007 frames on your main window. In this case, there are separate resources you need to include in your app, and the framework inserts a hook only for frame window creation.
As I found out in http://forum.codejock.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=9720
there is no skin for Office2007 for anything other than blue and aqua.
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MacW
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Posted: 08 April 2008 at 9:27am |
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Hi, Adrian
thank you very much for your support and guidance. So, there is no black office skin. Hence my attempts are futile. And there is no common concept pr mechanism in XTP which allows me to control the look of the various XTP classes, frame windows, toolbars etc. in a global way. And there is also no documentation of how all this is meant to be used, how the classes relate, which paint managers or paint manager functions are meant to be used with which class. I suppose we are meant to find out how this works by trial and error then... Yes, I know there are samples. But they often just throw functions and methods around without explaining anything. You open a sample, they call 20 methods, initiate different themes and paint managers, and then achieve the look they want. But when you try to make it work for your application or change something, you're at a loss. Suddenly it falls apart, and there is no documentation which explains what each of these method do. Which would in turn allow us to find out what to use, and when. This is sometimes very frustrating when you're facing a deadline... @Codejock Anyway, if the way I do it works with the default blue Office 2007 skin and the Office2007 paint manager, it should work with Aqua too. But when switching to Aqua (skins, themes, resources), the different UI elements look different (see my screen shot). Any idea? |
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adrien
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Joined: 30 April 2007 Location: New Zealand Status: Offline Points: 449 |
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Posted: 10 April 2008 at 3:13am |
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you're welcome
missing those screenshots though.
There is a lot of trial and error I've found, esp for things like the task panel, you've not only got themes to test out, but also behaviours.
I've found responsiveness to be very good here on the forums if you have any issue, but still that is very resource-consuming for CodeJock. I'd rather Oleg was writing code than answering zillions of FAQs
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