Themes and Skins + Style-sheets: general question

[Griff]

We're replacing a CLASSIC ASP application.

In this application, we presented a dialogue box that allowed end users to
specify exactly how they wanted their screen to look. So, they could set
the font size, font colour, border widths/style/colour etc, etc.

This information was then held in a database.

When the ASP page was loaded, it used an INCLUDE function to include a file
"application.cs s.asp". This was effectively an ASP page that created a
style sheet whose values were populated from the database using an ADO
recordset, for example:
p {font-size:<%=rsCusto misation.fields .items("fontSiz e").value%>; }

What I'd like to do is to re-create this level of configuration in our site
using the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. Is it possible using Themes & Skins, or do
I have to engineer this myself?

Thanks

Griff

[Alan Silver]

>We're replacing a CLASSIC ASP application.

In this application, we presented a dialogue box that allowed end users to
specify exactly how they wanted their screen to look. So, they could set
the font size, font colour, border widths/style/colour etc, etc.

This information was then held in a database.

When the ASP page was loaded, it used an INCLUDE function to include a file
"application.c ss.asp". This was effectively an ASP page that created a
style sheet whose values were populated from the database using an ADO
recordset, for example:
p {font-size:<%=rsCusto misation.fields .items("fontSiz e").value%>; }

What I'd like to do is to re-create this level of configuration in our site
using the ASP.NET 2.0 framework. Is it possible using Themes & Skins, or do
I have to engineer this myself?

There are a couple of ways of doing this, depending on quite how much
detail you want them to be able to change.

If you are happy to allow them to choose from a predefined set of
configurations, then themes are the way to go. You just have to create a
theme for each combination of factors. The problem here is that if the
number of combinations leads to a huge number of themes. That could get
messy and unmanageable.

If you want them to have a really detailed control over so many details
that themes aren't practical, then you could look at personalisation .
This allows you to store specific information on a per user basis. The
framework handles most of the storage part for you, and you can just
pull out the specifics and set (for example) font sizes in much the same
way you showed above.

HTH

--
Alan Silver
(anything added below this line is nothing to do with me)