Developer’s Guide

3-4 Developer’s Guide
XML editors expect these characters to be coded as character
entities:
Using the character instead of the character entity results in an error
from the XML editor. However, FileMaker Pro does not reinterpret
character entities—values in the THEMENAME element will
appear exactly as typed. You can avoid the problem by using a text
editor to create your themes or simply ignore the error from the XML
editor. Your theme names will appear as you write them in the New
Layout/Report assistant.
If you’re planning to use your themes on Windows and Mac OS
platforms, use the HINT attribute to ensure that upper-ASCII
characters (such as the accent mark) appear correctly on both
platforms. See “Valid values for theme attributes” on page 3-7 for
more information.
Removing elements from a theme file
The FileMaker Pro layout theme files contain multi-line elements for
fields, field labels, text, and every part in a layout. Each of these
elements contains other multi-line elements and single-line
elements. You can remove any of these elements, but you must
remove the entire element—that is, everything inside the element’s
start and end tags and the start and end tags as well.
FileMaker Pro will use default values for any elements you remove
(see “Specifying default values for themes” on page 3-9).
A single-line element, such as the PEN element, begins with <PEN
and ends with /> on a single line, and looks like this:
<PEN COLOR="#000066" PATTERN="2" SIZE="0" />
A multi-line element has start and end tags that look like this:
<BORDER>
</BORDER>
To remove a multi-line element, delete the start and end tags and all
elements contained within them. For example, to remove a multi-line
BORDER element in the Blue_gold.fth file, delete all three lines:
<BORDER>
<PEN COLOR="#000000" PATTERN="2" SIZE="1" />
</BORDER>
XML elements for layout parts
An FMTHEME element can contain any of the following multi-line
elements to describe the parts in a FileMaker Pro layout. Each layout
part element contains additional elements to describe the background
fill, text, field labels, and fields in the layout part.
Elements for layout parts can be listed in any order within an
FMTHEME element in the XML document. However, if two
identical elements are listed (such as two BODYPART elements),
FileMaker Pro will only use the attributes for the last one in the list.
Character Coded as
ampersand (&) &amp;
less than (<) &lt;
greater than (>) &gt;
apostrophe (‘) &apos;
quote (“) &quot;
This multi-lined
element is used To describe this layout part
<TITLEHEADERPART>
</TITLEHEADERPART>
Title header — appears only once at the top
of the first screen or page.
<HEADERPART>
</HEADERPART>
Header — appears at the top of every screen
or page (except the first one if there’s a title
header).