Development Guide

Table Of Contents

Chapter 4

Creating custom layout themes 41

Adding comments to theme files

You can add additional information to your XML theme files by

enclosing the information in comment tags:

<!- - my comment here - ->

FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced will ignore any unknown

(but syntactically correct) XML elements you may choose to include.

This allows your theme ﬁles to be backward and forward compatible

with other versions of FileMaker Pro and FileMaker

Pro Advanced.

Checking theme files for errors

FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced cannot parse an XML

theme document that is not well-formed, and they do not validate the

XML in your documents. If one required item is missing or wrong,

FileMaker

Pro Advanced 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:

1 The theme filename has the .fth extension.

1 The theme file is in text format.

1 The theme file is located in the Themes folder inside the

FileMaker Pro Advanced application folder.

1 All required elements are there, including their start and end tags:

<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes" ?>

</FMTHEME>

</FMTHEMES>

1 All elements are complete. There are no missing attributes, values,

quotation marks, start tags, or end tags.

1 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 “ ”).

1 All elements and attributes are spelled correctly.

1 All attribute values are spelled correctly and are valid.

1 Every single-line element ends with />.

1 All multi-line elements are spelled correctly and their start and end

tags match (for example, <BODYPART> and </BODYPART>).