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Wrapping an Existing Theme

The xhtml theme provides several good examples of the "wrapping" technique. The simple theme renders the basic control. The xhtml theme "dresses up" many of the controls by adding a header and footer.

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One benefit of object-orientated programming is that it lets us "design by difference." We can extend an object and code only the behavior that changes. Themes provide a similar capability. The subdirectory that hosts a theme can contain a theme.properties file. A parent entry can be added to the property file to designate a theme to extend. The ajax theme extends the xhtml theme using this technique.

parent = xhtml

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