Problem using TreeListView with Jet Pack Theme?

[Charles]

I've recently been experimenting with the RadTreeListView. It doesn't seem to "play well" with the newest Jet Pack theme from Microsoft.
 
I first used it as a test within a Silverlight application without navigation. The default Office Black theme it used was not very good in that the selected items in the grid view were not visible due the foreground and background being very close in color. Changing the theme of the page using the Rad themes seemed to solve this problem. I used Windows7 or one of the other Office themes and got black foreground with lighter background.

Then I attempted to test using the Jet Pack theme within a navigation framework. Now I can't seem to see the text within the grid/treelistview because the foreground is too light and so is the background. I have attempted to use the RowStyle property with a style that sets the foreground/background. Although the background changes - the foreground remains the same. This is also no help with the column headers which are also hard to see due to light text with light backgrounds.

Is this something to do with the Jet Pack theme - or is it a deficiency with the TreeListView?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Perhaps you can suggest some styles I can apply to the rows and/or column headers to solve my problem.

Thanks.

[Charles]

Some new info.

I isolated everything I was doing with the RadTreeListView from the Jet pack Theme. Now all rows and column headers are visible with default Office Black theme. (And I imagine others as well.)

So, that seems to verify that the various styles in the Jet Pack Theme somehow override and make barely visible the TreeListView rows and column headers.

Any plans on supporting the Jet Pack Theme? In the meantime, as a stopgap, can you recommend a workaround? (Setting RowStyle and whatever needs to be set for the column headers?)

Thanks.

[Kalin Milanov]

Hello Charles,

So far i do not believe we have not tested whether or not the themes provided by Microsoft or any other third party for that matter affect our controls. In theory they should not be affected as the the theme itself does not support them but the use of standard controls like TextBox and TextBlock could potentially be affected. That being said could you please send me the sample you were using in your original post, so we can debug it and resolve any issues related to that. 

On a side note we do have plans on providing a Jet Pack-ish theme for our controls, although we have not yet decided on any specifics on when it will be available. 

Waiting for your sample. 

Regards,
Kalin Milanov
the Telerik team

[Charles]

Going to have to set up a support ticket so I can attach the solution. I am in the process of doing that now.

[Charles]

I just wanted to share the solution/workaround for this issue. The support ticket was answered quickly and accurately.

First, the support response:
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The problem lies in an implicit style for the TextBlock. When the theme is applied the TextBlock implicit style applies to all cells in the TreeListView and as such they appear white on a white background. This is most definitely a shortcoming of ours and we will be aiming to fix this as soon as we possibly can. The only workaround I can offer you at this point is to change the color of that implicit style. You can find it in the CoreStyles.xaml on line 1042. Currently is bound to a {StaticResource NormalFontBrush}.
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And next, what I did to solve my particular problem:

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I changed the TextBlock style in CoreStyles.xml to have a foreground of Navy. (Just happened to choose that one for testing...dark enough to show up.)

The results were not good for the default theme of Office Black for the TreeListView because, although the Navy foreground showed up fine in the data rows - in the column headers it was not comfortably visible within the black background.

However, once I changed the default theme for the container user control that holds an instance of the TreeListView to Windows 7, all was well. I could see both column headers and data rows. I haven't yet tested with other themes, but I would assume any themes where backgrounds are sufficiently light-colored will work.
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[Ken Morris]

Please do work with the Microsoft folks who did JetPack!!!
that theme as-is looks great and we want to use it with the telerik controls right now....
I have found that some controls will work very simpley by copying the jetpack style and modfying the targettype to the rad version of the control like Button ==> RadButton

so if we can find all the right templates to hookup it can work.....

FWIW i think the current TargetType / Class theming may be a bit to much....  Kind of wish there was a way to have a "Generic" themeing like
Button == Button / RadButton or any other "BUtton"
then the same for ComboBox ==> RadCombobox
and so on... many of the Rad* controls have standard counterparts that should be "Mappable"
SUcks that Themes are stuck on class names in this regard....

[Kalin Milanov]

Hi Ken Morris,

We are currently working on designing a JetPack theme for our controls and so far it is shaping up pretty well. As with the rest of our themes this will be our take on the subject although this time around it is much closer to the one provided by Microsoft. 

Regards,
Kalin Milanov
the Telerik team