How to Build and Change ZKoss Theme

ZKThemer

zkthemer is an automatic color theme generator

Download

You can download zkthemer from zkthemer.jar.

How to use it

zkthemer is a java command line application, it should work on any Java 6 platform, tested on Linux and Windows.

Generate New Colour Theme

The instructions shown are on a Windows cmd line. It should be similar on a bash shell. In the following, we assume that the zkthemer.jar has been placed in C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer.

C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer>java -jar zkthemer.jar
Option is mandatory: --baseColor -c value : Base color in 6 hex digit format, for example: A4BC03
Option is mandatory: --ignoreFiles -i value : The names of ignore components (splitter with comma such as '-i colorbox,grid', type '-i n' if won't)
Option is mandatory: --themeName -t value : Theme name
Option is mandatory: --zklib -z value : Location (directory) containing the zk jars
The options available are:
        --baseColor -c value : Base color in 6 hex digit format, for example: A4BC03
        --ignoreFiles -i value : The names of ignore components (splitter with comma such as '-i colorbox,grid', type '-i n' if won't)
        --themeName -t value : Theme name
        --zklib -z value : Location (directory) containing the zk jars

The first step is to put all the zk jars of your current version in one directory, for example a sub-directory called zk-jars as in the following:

C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer>cd zk-jars

C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer\zk-jars>dir
 Volume in drive C is system
 Volume Serial Number is C4BE-F9D9

 Directory of C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer\zk-jars

05/08/2012  10:38 AM    <DIR>          .
05/08/2012  10:38 AM    <DIR>          ..
03/08/2012  06:07 PM           441,834 zcommon-5.0.9.jar
03/08/2012  06:07 PM         1,127,215 zk-5.0.9.jar
03/08/2012  06:08 PM           133,420 zkplus-5.0.9.jar
03/08/2012  06:07 PM         1,434,274 zul-5.0.9.jar
03/08/2012  06:07 PM           205,494 zweb-5.0.9.jar
               5 File(s)      3,342,237 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  35,672,846,336 bytes free

We then run zkthemer with the theme name "cdrator-color" , giving 949599(gray) as the basic color

C:\rator\cdrator-ZKThemer>java -jar zkthemer.jar -c 949599 -z zk-jars -t cdrator-color -i n
Generated file: cdrator-color.jar

After running the command a new jar called "cdrator-color.jar" is generated.

Use New Theme

It is not enough to just drop the created jar in your application classpath. You have to do the following:

1. In your zk.xml add the following

<desktop-config>
     <theme-provider-class>zkthemer.ThemeProvider</theme-provider-class>
</desktop-config>

2. Place the cdrator-color.jar in your application classpath.

3. Restart the server. Your application will now have the gray color as base for all the components, like in the image bellow:

Fig 1. A ZKoss window with gray base color

References

Zkoss documentation

ZKThemer