Changing skin font or colour

[sub]

Can I ask kindof the reverse: how do I read a colour from the xml into a plugin (so I can draw something in a colour defined by the skin)?

I've found SkinHelper.GetColor() but I'll be buggered if I can get it to work. Maybe I'm not specifying the colour properly in the skin? I've tried <NamedColor> and <Color> both within <NamedColors> and <Colors> groups. The SkinHelper always returns white, even if I pass it a string that doesn't exist.

Iain

GetColor() was really just meant as an internal method to the SkinHelper but for some reason it ended up public. Its sole purpose is to take string with a solid color name ("Black", "White", "Red", "LightGray" ... "Salmon" etc), or a web style color "#RRGGBB", and return the matching .Net Color object. It is not used for looking up custom color definitions in the skin file.

[imilne]

Ah right. Does that mean we can't read colours from the skin (via your API)? I'll suss out another way if not...

Iain

[sub]

No, not currently.

I can add a GetNamedColorText() method to the next build for you if you like. It'll return a string though, not a color, since the <Color> tag can be used to define complicated things like gradients etc which cant be held in a Color.

If you know your colors will be Solid, not gradients, then you could do something like skinHelper.GetColor(GetNamedColorText("@hightlingColor"));. If you wanted to cope with gradients you'd pretty much need to parse the text yourself and create the brush, since the gradients depend on the rectangle size etc.

[imilne]

Yeah, this was to read two solid colours that would then be used to create a LinearGradientBrush in the code. I'll just parse the XmlDocument from GetBackingDocument() - I should be able to find what I'm after that way, and it only needs to be done once.

Although if you still want to add the method, it'll certainly help in my case

Iain

[imilne]

This is a bit clunky (and error prone for now), but from this xml:

Code:

<Colors>
    <Color name="customcolor" color="#ff0000"/>
</Colors>

You can get the colour via:

Code:

XmlDocument doc = skinHelper.GetBackingDocument();
XmlNodeList colors = doc.GetElementsByTagName("Color");
Color c = ColorTranslator.FromHtml(colors[0].Attributes[1].Value);

Obviously the array will need checked to ensure you've found the colour you're after, but it seems to work fine.

[sub]

Find the correct color node with an xpath query like this:

string colorText = skinHelper.GetBackingDocument.SelectSingleNode("/Skin/Colors/Color[@name=\"customcolor\"]").InnerText;

[mvallevand]

I just checked, and found I'd already implemented part of what you wanted. You can do something like this:

<Text text="@subtitle" location="0,13" size="90,10" font="@fontName" align="center"/>

And pass in the "@fontName" in the args:

To confirm this is just what I needed, thanks.

Martin

[sub]

Great.

[imilne]

Find the correct color node with an xpath query like this:

string colorText = skinHelper.GetBackingDocument.SelectSingleNode("/Skin/Colors/Color[@name=\"customcolor\"]").InnerText;

Heh, even simpler. Excellent :-)

Iain

[imilne]

Could someone explain to me how the "visible" attributes work?

I've seen a few references to it around, but I can't work out how to use it. Should I be able to control the visibility of elements, text, images, etc by defining a visible="@someValue" and then setting that to true/false in code?

I already control visible text by setting stuff I don't want shown to "". And for UiStatic elements I just don't add them to the render list. This works, but maybe I'm not doing it the best way...

Iain