Overview

The Platform Theme System manages all files needed to skin our server-based thin-client offerings (BA Server and plugins). It was designed to satisfy the following goals:

Eliminate the need for web and plugin developers to manually manage CSS
All theme assets need to be automatically injected into every page displayed by our server
Allow Customers/OEMs/etc to contribute new themes via plugins
Separate "core" theme files from plugin-specific ones
Provide extensible architecture for providing plugins via unanticipated methods

API

The Theme System API has two main interfaces:

org.pentaho.platform.api.ui.IThemeManager (Source)

The name "manager" is a bit of a misnomer. It simply serves to provide all known themes in the system. The manager delegates this discovery to the next interface: IThemeResolver

org.pentaho.platform.api.ui.IThemeResolver (Source)

Theme Resolvers are called upon to find all themes they can.

Implementations

org.pentaho.platform.web.html.themes.DefaultThemeManager (Source)

This Manager caches all results from the resolvers in the Platform CacheManager to reduce memory overhead.

org.pentaho.platform.web.html.themes.PluginThemeResolver (Source)

The Plugin resolver finds theme definitions within Platform Plugins.

org.pentaho.platform.web.html.themes.ServletContextThemeResolver (Source)

ServletContext resolver finds themes from top-level folders in the Pentaho WAR.

Both of these stock resolvers use the same theme.xml file format to describe theme assets