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Skin inheritance

Updated on December 13, 2022
Applicable to Theme Cosmos 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 more information, see Adding inheritance to an existing skin.

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.
  • Adding inheritance to an existing skin

    Share design patterns between skins by using inheritance. When you define a parent for your skin, all the parent style formats, mixins, and CSS style sheets become available to the dependent skin, with changes to the parent cascading automatically to the dependent.

  • Overriding disabled screen layout formats

    Define which screen layout styles your application can use by overriding disabled formats in the skin. Some inherited style formats for screen layouts are disabled by default to improve loading time. If you decide to use one of the disabled screen layouts in your application, you can override the default setting.

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