Applying skins to form views

Although views provide a good way to customize the look of forms for differing audiences and purposes, maintaining views can become complicated in situations where copies of all views must be provided for multiple sets of users (for example, multiple companies). Another way to provide a customized look and feel of components in a form for different groups is through the use of skins.

Skin is a term commonly used to describe the appearance and layout of pages in a website. Skins are also called themes in some environments. In AR System server , skin refers to the ability to change the appearance of components (such as panels, character fields, or tables) on a view of a  AR System form without having to modify any form or view definitions. By being able to change skin properties for a form view, the same view of that form can appear differently to different groups of users, based on the permissions specified for the skin.

For example, for user group A, a form view might have panels with a blue background in the header (see the following figure); for user group B, those same panel headers might have a green background (see the following figure).

Using skins to distinguish views for user group A

Using skins to distinguish views for user group

For more information, see the following topics:

• Properties to which skins can be applied
• Types of skins and their priorities
• Defining skins
• Copying skins
• Activating skins