Creating your own themes. HowTo?

[Frank]

Well, the subject says it all . I've looked on this forum to find something of a FAQ or topics related to the subject, but failed. Does something of a FAQ on theme creation exist?
Can anyone show me a thread so I can get to work on my own theme?

Or is it maybe better to modify each dialog by hand? Basically all I want is the 'side bar' and 'top bar' off each dialog to be replaced with the logo of my company. So the theme is fine, just not the pictures.

[mills]

Copy the theme closest to the one you like to its own folder, and then customize the dialogs. The new theme will even show in the list of built-in InstallAware themes in the IDE, together with a bitmap theme preview, if it has been done properly.

[bokkie]

I copied a theme and noted that each dialog is 388h x 503w. I massaged a bitmap with Snagit to the same dimensions as the dialog. I then added an image control to each dialog and loaded the bitmap into it. I set the top and left properties to 0 and then set the image to "send to back". I then set the auto size property to true. That obviously caused the image to maximise to fill the dialog and all the properties were then visible on top. For some reason, if I did the auto size first and then set "send to back" after, when I moved some other controls on the dialog some took a piece of the bitmap with them! I have a bald spot above my right ear trying to work out a solution to that. I never found a reason but once I set "send to back" first and then auto size I had no further problems. Perhaps it was just my machine...

The ad.bmp which is used as the preview when selecting a theme was easy. I just took a screencap of the welcome dialog and resized it to the same size as another ad.bmp (193 x 150) and the preview is bang on the money.

I also started thinking on something. Say I then made a local edit to a dialog in the project and then reload the theme, the changes I make would then be lost because they'd be overwritten? I never tried it but it sort of ties in with the message you get when you switch themes. So, make your change to the theme dialog only or risk losing local edits. Otherwise, I understand more about themes than I did a day ago.

[mills]

That's correct. If you edit a dialog that is included with a theme, it will lose any edits you made in the project folder,when you change themes. There's a pretty clear warning about this. So, you may want to back up your dialogs before hand if you've made edits.

Otherwise, dialogs created that don't have matching names as those found in the theme should be retained without change.

[bokkie]

I spent a pleasant morning adding the company's corporate logo to the dialogs and it look quite good now that I've been given a new bitmap. If I understand it then, if I remove a dialog from a theme's folder, the one in the project will still be retained, warts and all. That's reassuring to know. Personally, I'm happy to have invested the time in changing all the dialogs in the company's theme. They also seem to like it and compared to the crappy version of IS they have installed, they are quite surprised as to how quick development is with IA and how easy it was to change its presentation.

[TheVman]

Does anyone have a IA project they are kind enough to share for building IA themes.
That is the IA project that creates the 'theme.exe' file for the "C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallAware\InstallAware 18\Dialogs\"mytheme" "folder, allowing it to loop through each themed dialog.

[FrancescoT]

The "theme.exe" file is only used to run the UI theme sample (see "InstallAware Dialog Samplers" folder under the IA Start Menu).

If you want to create your custom theme, just create a folder that contains your custom dialog resource files under; C:\Program Files (x86)\InstallAware\InstallAware 18\Dialogs .

Regards

[TheVman]

Hi Francesco,

Thanks for the reply, yes that's the file I want to build so the theme that I have built, as you have suggested, can run as per the InstallAware supplied themes. I was hoping to learn from the project, practice making themes and make some available on the forum for others.

[FrancescoT]

Dear Vman,

A "theme.exe" project only includes the Setup interview dialogs sequence.

To release it is quite simple; create a new project from scratch (for example, using the Basic project template) and then leave with the main script the dialog sequence only ( Welcome Dialog - Finish Dialog).

That's it!

Regards