How Skins Use Inheritance

A skin can inherit properties from a parent skin. When you create a customized skin, first make a copy of an existing skin. Through inheritance, you need only identify the ways the custom skin is different from its parent.

Inheritance for skins follows these rules:

A skin can have only one parent, but the parent skin can also have a parent. In this way, a skin could have a list of ancestors from which it inherits properties.

A parent skin can have any number of children that inherit properties from it.

Each skin has a skin.properties.xml file that lists the properties the skin does not inherit from its parent. In turn, if this skin has a child skin, the child inherits these modified properties.

The skin.properties.xml file also can contain a parent property that identifies the parent of the skin.

In addition to the properties in the skin.properties.xml file, a child also inherits the stylesheets and HTML fragments of the parent skin.

If a skin does not have a parent identified in the skin.properties.xml file, it inherits the properties of the My webMethods Server default skin, which is identified by the skin.default alias.