Understanding presentation styles

Presentation styles centralize the attributes related to the decoration of the graphical user interface elements.

The decoration attributes are defined in a separate file, which can be easily modified to customize the application.

Presentation styles are only supported for the GUI front-ends. If you design an application for the TUI mode, you can use TTY attributes.

Styles are applied implicitly by using global styles, or explicitly by naming a specific style in the style attribute of the element.

Common presentation attributes define font properties, foreground colors and background colors. Some presentation attributes are specific to a given class of widgets (like the first day of the week in a DATEEDIT item type).

Tip: For best performances and consistent look & feed, consider using GBC customization / theme variables instead of presentation styles to define application-wide decoration settings. For example, background color of form fields can be defined with theme variables.

Presentation styles are defined in a resource file having an extension of .4st. The .4st file must be distributed with the other runtime files.

Presentation styles are inspired by the cascading style sheets (CSS) used in HTML, with the following deviations:
  1. The elements using style definitions are AUI tree elements; CSS styles apply to HTML elements.
  2. To specify a style for an AUI tree element, you must use the "style" attribute; HTML/CSS use the "class" attribute.
  3. Inline-style definition is not supported in the AUI tree.
  4. Some pseudo selectors, such as "query, are specific to Genero.
Figure 1 shows a desktop application without presentation styles:
Figure: Form without presentation styles (GDC)

Screenshot of a form without presentation styles (GDC)
Figure 2 shows a desktop application with presentation styles:
Figure: Form using presentation styles (GDC)

Screenshot of a form using presentation styles (GDC)