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Skin inheritance

Updated on November 15, 2021
Applicable to Theme UI-Kit applications

Skin inheritance helps you reuse design patterns between skins. By setting up inheritance relations between skins, you can adopt a tiered approach to styling that reduces development effort on similar applications.

When you define a skin as a parent, you make all mixins, formats, and style sheets included in that skin available for use in the dependent skin. If you modify a format in the parent skin, the change cascades automatically to the dependent skins. This process is useful for designing skins for related applications that have the same general look and feel, but need to be distinct from one another on a more detailed level.

You can add inheritance to both new and existing skins.

For example: A bank uses different color schemes for each department, but wants to maintain a consistent visual identity. To meet this requirement, you can first create a parent corporate skin that defines the fonts, indents, backgrounds, and borders for the entire organization. Next, you set up dependent skins with different color schemes for each of the departments. The department skins inherit general settings from the parent, and – with no information about color to inherit from the parent – default to their own color settings.
  • Creating a new dependent skin

    When you create a new skin, you can add a parent skin. The new skin becomes dependent on the parent and inherits the parent's formats and mixins. If the parent skin is changed, those changes are inherited by the dependent skin.

  • Adding a parent skin

    You can add a parent to an existing skin. When you add a parent to a skin, the skin becomes dependent on the parent and inherits styles and formats from the parent. If the parent skin is changed, those changes are inherited by the dependent skin.

  • Overriding an inherited format

    You can override inherited formats in a dependent style to make an exception to the inherited styling.

  • Reverting an inherited format

    If an inherited format is overridden, reverting restores the format to the style inherited from the parent skin.

  • Viewing the skin inheritance stack

    The Inheritance tab of the Skin rule form lists the names, and the sequence of, the parent and dependent skins.

  • Inheritance

    The inheritance tab displays the parent styles for the current skin.

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