Read these lines after having successfully installed the ThemeEngine library.
After the installation of the ThemeEngine you will see a new THEMEENGINE tab on the components panel. Its typical view is shown below. All the library components are marked with the "TE" badge.
The first thing you should do to give a new interface appearance to your application is to add add the TTeThemeEngine component on the form. This component provides centralized operating mode of downloading, updating and switching-over of the themes.
If you plan to update already existing project you can use the ThemeEngine converter, just click twice on the component TTeThemeEngine and follow the master's instructions.
Then you can choose an active theme with the help of the TTeThemeEngine component. For this purpose use the ThemeFile, ThemeBuild, ThemeList and ThemeIndex properties. After the active theme is chosen, the application at start will load this theme.
If you want your application forms to have new interface appearance, put the TTeForm component on the form. This component should be added to each form which you want to modify. The TTeForm contains a number of properties which duplicate the properties of the standard form and the number of additional properties. They should be used to avoid a conflict situation. For example, in order to change the headline of the form it would be more correct to use the TTeForm.Caption property instead of the standard form Caption property.
To provide a new style to the control elements you should use only the components which support our library. All these components are equivalent to the standard ones, besides they are able to paint themselves with the use of the themes and are able to react to ThemeEngine events. Besides, more and more additional products supporting ThemeEngine developed both by us as well as other developers appear day by day. But in case no worthy analogues of the components necessary for you have been found, you should use the TTeAdapter component which allows you to adapt the component not supporting the ThemeEngine one.
In order to change the theme in the performance mode it is better to use TTeThemeSwitcher component, it allows to change the active theme easily and quickly, by the drop-down list. Besides, in order to change the active theme you can use the TTeThemeEngine component by changing its properties. Otherwise, you can use the global LoadThemeFromFile, ChangeTheme, etc. procedures.
If you have your own components and you want them to use ThemeEngine or you want to improve the components of other developers read the section about other components.
