Hi Joe and James,

You are pretty much correct on your assumptions here, and the Theme designer is a great tool to verify that you are.

The way this works is that if you create a custom control with some specific XSLT, that is the default  XSLT that would be used for that control, until it's themed, meaning that if you don't change it in your theme, the default control's data will be used.

You can see the default XSLT inside of the Default theme, where you can get a copy of it if needed.

When you do want to change the XSLT of a TextBox for instance, for your custom control, you have to use some property (or other means) of distinguishing between the standard TextBox (or other derivatives) and your own custom control.... more precisely, you want your new XSLT to only apply to your control. The most usual method to do this, is to use CustomStyle property. See more on the Custom controls wiki page.

You can also use the "Skinable Controls" item templates for this. You should find them if you add new item to the solution explorer, and they should be in a folder below the Visual WebGui item templates. The skinable controls provide you with a skeleton to call some predifined XSLT templates with parameters you can adjust, or you can change the XSLT completely. The skinable controls use CustomStyle to distinguish between controls.

Hope this helps,

Palli

Hi Joe,

At this time, we do not have any documentation on the XSLT template structure, and my guess is that if we did, it would be obsolete by now, as there have been some heavy changes towards the XSLT template structure lately, to support the skinable controls, as well as for standardization and other reasons. The skinable controls are basically custom controls implemented with a custom style and their default XSLT is just calling the standard XSLT templates.

What I find most convenient when viewing the related XSLTs and finding the correct templates, is to create a dummy theme in my project and look at the XSLTs in there. Most of the templates are on the Common node in the theme.

Regarding the HalfHourHeight not being a property on the control itself, I did already open an entry in our task tracker a while back on that request. Please view it here and follow up on our progress.

As for your specific question about how to change the Skin of the ScheduleBox, this is not something you can do runtime, but at design time, you would simply do the following. Create a custom control, which I will call CustScheduleBox. This will create CustScheduleBox class file, as well as CustScheduleBoxSkin skin file. Change the inheritance in the class file and make it inherit from ScheduleBox. Change the inheritance for the CustScheduleBoxSkin and make it inherit from ScheduleBoxSkin. Now build your application and double click CustScheduleBoxSkin to edit the skin in the designer. There you can simply change the HalfHourHeight property on the skin and you're done.

Hope this helps,

Palli

Hi Joe,

The HalfHourHeight property is both used in the resources, as well as in the serverside code. It really was my first thought to just change the HalfHourHeight to a property then change the resources to use that property, but that is not sufficient, as this property is used within the serverside code too. You will need the serverside code to complete the process, and in this case it's not public, so I really don't think you can make this work.

Palli