Forums Ultimate UI for Windows Forms
Your Privacy Matters: We use our own and third-party cookies to improve your experience on our website. By continuing to use the website we understand that you accept their use. Cookie Policy
Close
Geoff Hopkins
1470
AppStyles and Appearances best practices
posted

Hi there

We are currently making use of many appearance objects applied to various Infragistics 16.1 controls in a C# WinForms app.

We are interested in the use of applying skins to these controls via the StyleManager library.

I have noticed that when applying an AppStyle to objects which also have appearance objects assigned to them i.e. editable cell backgrounds and alternate row background colours in the UltraGrid that what is displayed is not always what I would expect, it sometimes appears as though the appearance overrides the AppStyle, it look is sort of a mix between the appearance and AppStyle.

Is this just a case of the specific AppStyle not have values that correspond to the same properties of the grid to which the Appearance is being applied?

What is best practice in regards to the combination of Appearances and AppStyles?

Should all appearance objects be removed and instead replaced entirely by the use of the AppStyles or can they be sucessfully combined?

Is there a hierarchy as to which gets applied?

Thanks in advance

Geoff

  • 4625
    Offline posted

    Hi,

    Thank you for posting in our forums!

    You are able to set all possible appearances programmatically or in the Visual Studio designer and the same way through AppStylist. The best practice would be to stick whether with entire AppStylist styling or appearances set in Visual Studio designer or programmatically. As you understand, the single responsibility principle plays a descent role here. Maintaining application’s appearance mixing design time set, programmatically and AppStylist appearances would be difficult, but as you already know not impossible task. I would recommend using AppStylist almost entirely across your application and in rare occasions set the appearance with one of the alternative ways whenever it is not possible to use AppStylist.

    Regarding the resolution order you can read this forum thread about how can I override the AppStylist settings on a particular control? Moreover, for further information about how AppStylist actually works you can visit our getting started documentation page.

    Let me know if you need further assistance on this matter.