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Major Theming Changes for Big Box 9.4


Jason Carr

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1 minute ago, Undertherainbow said:

@Jason Carr

For test i downloaded

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/files/file/1328-futurestate-neon-deluxe/

ran BB and i was expecting styles to be merged and styles folder gone.

it didn't happen, only hex:count was updated?

How are you testing if the styles were merged? Generally, if the theme is working properly, then everything went as expected.

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Yeah , theme is searching for styles folder and throws error. I think it might be because of his coding style , its not proper xaml formatting all in one line. Not sure

 

yeah it doesnt change theme files for styles

 

<UserControl.Resources>
<ResourceDictionary>
<ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
<ResourceDictionary Source="pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/FutureStateNeonDeluxe/Styles/FSAnimations.xaml" />
</ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
</ResourceDictionary>
</UserControl.Resources>

 

Edited by Undertherainbow
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@Undertherainbow I haven't checked that theme in detail, but I have found the issue. Thanks for reporting it and helping me troubleshoot. There's an FSAnimations.xaml file in the Styles folder that it can't parse; I just never expected there to be a file in there that isn't used by the Big Box themes directly. I'm guessing maybe it's used by another control or something, but I'm not sure how without Big Box knowing about it. It should be an easy fix, but I probably won't get it in yet tonight.

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5 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

Styles XAML Files No Longer Supported

In the past, the previous code allowed for occasional theme conflicts when switching between themes. If you've ever seen a particular styling from one theme end up in another, then you've noticed this in the past. This was caused by theme styles not getting fully reset to defaults before applying the new styles, which was a rare problem, but it did happen between particular themes. We've simplified themes going forward so that styles cannot be shared between themes, which should eliminate this as a problem as well as make things a little bit more straightforward for new theme developers.

All of my themes are broken. About the above problem of one theme's styling ending up in another -- I honestly never saw that problem, and if it's a rare problem between particular themes maybe it's due to how those themes were designed. Doing away with the ability to use styles totally destroys my themes. If they work on your setup that's great, and I'd be surprised. Even if this does not break themes, it makes it harder to maintain them especially for those of us who rely on styles to create uniform appearances.

P.s. I did download fresh copies of my themes just to see, and they're definitely broken. The theme upgrade process seems to just delete the Style folder and does not do anything to put the appropriate styles into the view files.

P.p.s. If I put a fresh copy of a theme in Themes and add to that theme's folder the 9.4.5.txt file, it seems to prevent the upgrade process from messing up the theme. However, there are still some weird style issues that are occurring with files such as ListBoxItemStyle.

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1 hour ago, Jason Carr said:

@Undertherainbow I haven't checked that theme in detail, but I have found the issue. Thanks for reporting it and helping me troubleshoot. There's an FSAnimations.xaml file in the Styles folder that it can't parse; I just never expected there to be a file in there that isn't used by the Big Box themes directly. I'm guessing maybe it's used by another control or something, but I'm not sure how without Big Box knowing about it. It should be an easy fix, but I probably won't get it in yet tonight.

This is probably the same reason my themes are broken.

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5 minutes ago, Undertherainbow said:

As far as i can see FSanimations are for wheel fade control and popup another info after hide. Easy fix would be just to copy data from it to files that have reference to it

Thank you. To be clear I don't use that particular file, but I do put my own xaml files in the Styles folder. I know other theme developers do, too.

That fix is reasonable if it's done automatically by BigBox. But the theme developer should not have to do this. It goes against the principle of refactoring and makes maintenance more difficult.

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6 minutes ago, eatkinola said:

Thank you. To be clear I don't use that particular file, but I do put my own xaml files in the Styles folder. I know other theme developers do, too.

That fix is reasonable if it's done automatically by BigBox. But the theme developer should not have to do this. It goes against the principle of refactoring and makes maintenance more difficult.

Agreed there, it does make things a lot more work, especially if u do changes to styles, u have to edit each and every file that has that style (as u said , maintenance). But i guess it had to be done, if there is *no other way to fix and quote " occasional theme conflicts when switching between themes "

I honestly didnt experience that, probably because i stick to one theme :)

Edited by Undertherainbow
typos im sleepy
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9 hours ago, Jason Carr said:

@eatkinola There's really nothing to worry about. I'll fix the issue tomorrow and everything will upgrade smoothly. Just give me a day.

Thanks, Jason. I know you always get things squared away, and I appreciate the effort you continue to put into improvements. There are a few quirky things about my themes in their current form on the downloads area. I have some updates in progress on my dev machine that are working fine (prior to the recent styles change), so I'll test with these versions once you have a fix in place.

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4 hours ago, eatkinola said:

Thanks, Jason. I know you always get things squared away, and I appreciate the effort you continue to put into improvements. There are a few quirky things about my themes in their current form on the downloads area. I have some updates in progress on my dev machine that are working fine (prior to the recent styles change), so I'll test with these versions once you have a fix in place.

Let's talk and come up with a plan here; I'll PM you. I think the first thing that I should change is to not delete the Styles folder if there are extra files in there, and only remove the Styles XAML files that no longer apply. That's fairly easy to do. I'll hit you up.

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Just put out a new beta which should hopefully fix the upgrade processes for @eatkinola's themes, and also FutureState Neon Deluxe by @Mr. RetroLust. My apologies for the number of betas required to get this right. Hopefully we'll be good now, but let me know if not.

Do keep in mind that unfortunately, if you've used previous betas, you'll need to re-download the affected themes from the forums as they were previously left in an incorrect state.

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Hello all, first off, I have to apologize, but I'm changing the strategy slightly for the "removing the styles" changes I had posted before. I spent the better part of a week banging my head against the wall trying to get all the themes to upgrade properly automatically, only to discover that I was "doing it wrong". ;)

As it turns out, the issue with the Styles portion of the themes affecting other themes was not the styles XAML files themselves, but rather the fact that they were referenced globally instead of directly from the views that use them. So the good news is that we can continue to use styles, and all we have to do is explicitly reference them instead of removing them completely and copying their code directly into the views.

For example:

<UserControl.Resources>
    <ResourceDictionary>
        <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
            <ResourceDictionary Source="pack://siteoforigin:,,,/Themes/Unified Redux/Styles/HorizontalListBoxStyle.xaml" />
        </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>
    </ResourceDictionary>
</UserControl.Resources>

This way, we can keep all our styles files, so long as the views that use them directly reference them like the above. And thankfully, it was relatively easy to automatically update all existing themes to use the new method. I've literally tested every single theme available in the forums download section, and sans for a couple of themes that seemed to be slightly broken from the get go, every single one is working.

Unfortunately since the upgrade strategy has changed though, you will need to delete and re-download any themes that you want to automatically update using the new method. Most themes (but not all) were still working properly with the old method, but this new method is recommended before making changes and submitting a new version of your theme. Any themes in your collection (that were not previously upgraded using the old method) will be upgraded upon startup of Big Box 9.4-beta-9. I do apologize for how messy I've made this, but I'm finally confident that we have a good solution here, and it should make everyone happy because all the issues are fixed without forcing any major restructuring. I previously hadn't realized the impact that removing the styles would have on some of the themes.

Thank you all once again; I plan to put out the 9.4 release early next week, so that is when these theme changes will be available for everyone. :)

@faeran @Mr. RetroLust @RetroHumanoid @wallmachine @eatkinola @bbweiners @keltoigael @Jack. @y2guru @whoozwah @SNAK3ATER @Rincewind @CriticalCid @shro2016 @broskiplays @Grila @NJDave71 @Hexxxer @PhillsDoodles @Zombeaver @Omen @Cookz718 @viking @OrochiMishima @nosh @ea4492 @Maddoc1007 @vsilvalopes @damageinc86 @walter10h @skainlurmis @Scottad @Nyny77 @Sithel @Akezhar @Thanos Reigns

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6 minutes ago, bbweiners said:

@Jason Carr -- I'm in the middle of creating a new theme. So will it just be updated if I install 9.4 beta 9 after opening it for the first time? Or do I have to upload it and then download it and run 9.4 beta 9? I'm a bit confused.

Thanks

You should be safe just continuing to create the theme. The first time you load it up with a Big Box 9.4 beta (or later on the official release), it should automatically update itself just fine. Assuming everything is working properly, then you shouldn't have any issues. It might be a good idea to test the theme with 9.4-beta-9, however, to make sure everything is working.

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