Styles and Themes
This applies to: Managed Dashboards, Managed Reports
Styles and themes give you an easy way to apply predefined settings to your visualizations, components, or filters to give them a consistent style or to reuse previous settings.
A typical scenario for creating styles and themes is when you have several related dashboards or reports and you want all their contents to have a consistent appearance from one dashboard to the next. You can also apply one of the existing themes or styles provided.
Related video: Styles and Themes
Styles
A style contains the settings for most of the properties of a component, filter, or data visualization. The only exclusions are properties that are typically never shared, such as references to a specific metric set, or the specific text displayed in a label or button.
You can save your own style and then easily apply it to another of the same type of element, or you can apply one of the existing provided styles. The following steps work the same way for any component, filter or visualization, including the visualization in a full screen metric set.
Save a Style
As an example, create a new blank dashboard, and select Components, then Button in the toolbar to add a button component.
Use Quick Access Properties or the Properties window to change some settings for the button. For example, switch to the Design tab in the Properties window and customize other properties, such as Rest Body, Rest Background, Rest Border.
In the toolbar, select Styles, then Save Style.
In the Save dialog, select a folder location and enter a file name for the style. You may want to include the type of the element in the name for easy reference.
Select Save at the bottom of the dialog.
If you expanded the Styles folder earlier in the Explore window as shown below, your new style may not appear until you right-click the folder and choose Refresh.
Apply a Style
Continuing the example, add a new button to the dashboard. There are a couple of ways to apply a saved style:
You can go to the Explore window and expand the Styles folder, then drag a style onto an element (the button in our example).
Another way is to select an element on the canvas if applicable, select Styles in the toolbar and Apply Style. Select a style in the list that appears, then select Open.
In our example, we now have two similarly-styled buttons.
When applying a style, you can expand the Shared subfolder under Styles to find various styles provided for you. Choose one named with an element type that matches your element, for example, Button.
Compatibility
You can usually only apply a style to the same type of element that was used to save the style. For example:
Each type of gauge uses separate styles, for example, radial vs. linear gauges. A single gauge can have multiple pointers with different pointer types, so pointer properties are only applied to matching pointers.
Sparkline, Data Bar, and Horizontal Plot are specialized versions of charts in reports and scorecards. These are not compatible with regular charts so that a theme can contain separate styles for line charts (with visible axes) and for sparklines (without visible axes), for example.
For visualizations, there are certain exceptions where you can apply the same style to different visualization types:
A single chart can contain different chart types on each data point series, so any chart style can be applied to any other chart. Data Point Series properties from the style are only applied to series with a similar chart type setting. For example, a style created from a line chart can be applied to a bar chart, but the styling of a line series will not be applied to the bar series because these are very different.
Styles for all of the relationship diagram types are compatible with each other because they are each made up of nodes and links that have similar settings.
Note: Try to apply styles before making your own customizations. Applying a style may change existing settings you might not have thought of.
Themes
A theme is a collection of existing styles, which you can apply all at once to a view such as a dashboard or report.
Create a Theme
To create a theme, select Theme in the toolbar, then Create Theme. If an element on the canvas is selected, select an empty area first to de-select the element.
In the New Theme dialog, set a Name. In the Save dialog that appears, optionally also change the selected folder Location for the theme, then select Save at the bottom.
Returning to the New Theme dialog, select Add style. In the Open dialog, select an existing style to be added to the theme and select Open at the bottom.
Add other styles to the theme as desired.
Note: Adding multiple styles compatible with the same element will apply them all in order. For example, chart styles are compatible with all other charts.
Select the Save button at the bottom.
If you expanded the Themes folder earlier in the Explore window as shown below, your new theme might not appear until you right-click the folder and choose Refresh.
Apply a Theme
In this example, we added a couple of button components and a bar chart with some data to a dashboard. There are a couple of ways to apply a theme to your dashboard, report, or other view:
You can drag a theme from the Explore window and drop it onto an empty area of the canvas.
With no elements selected on the canvas, select Theme in the toolbar, then Apply Theme. Select a theme and select Open.
The theme is applied to the current view, applying the styles to every compatible element.
Setting a Default Theme
Administrators can configure the application so that a default theme is automatically applied when first creating visualizations, components, and filters, to customize their default colors and other appearance. This includes when data is first added to a visualization, or when re-visualizing the entire visualization when editing or viewing.
Built-in Styles and Themes
The Global project includes a set of built-in styles and themes you can use.
You don't need to switch to the <Global> project to access these styles and themes: just expand the Shared subfolder under Styles or Themes in your current project.
For more information, see:
Video: Styles and Themes