Developer’s Guide

Table Of Contents
Creating custom layout themes 5-11
Checking your theme document for errors
FileMaker Pro cannot parse an XML theme document that is not
well-formed, and it does not validate the XML in your documents.
If one required item is missing or wrong, FileMaker Pro will ignore
the entire document.
Here is a list of things to check for if your new layout themes don’t
appear in the New Layout/Report assistant as expected:
The theme filename has the .fth extension.
The theme file is in text format.
The theme file is located in the Themes folder inside the
FileMaker Developer application folder.
All required elements are there, including their start and end tags:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>
<FMTHEMES>
<FMTHEME>
<THEMENAME VALUE="Purple and White Screen" />
</FMTHEME>
</FMTHEMES>
All elements are complete—there are no missing attributes, values,
quotation marks, start tags, or end tags.
All values are enclosed in quotation marks (“value”)—there are no
missing opening or closing quotation marks, and there are no missing
values (no blank quotation marks “ ”).
All elements and attributes are spelled correctly.
All attribute values are spelled correctly and are valid.
Every single-line element ends with />.
All multi-line elements are spelled correctly and their start and end
tags match, for example, <BODYPART> and </BODYPART>.