JasperReports Server 4.0 introduces a new look and feel, and more importantly, a complete mechanism to easily modify the appearance of the user interface (UI). This mechanism called themes is based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the web standard for defining the appearance of HTML content.
The set of all CSS files and associated images that defines the appearance of the user interface is a theme. Themes are stored as file resources in folders in the repository, with special menus on theme folders for activating, uploading, and downloading a theme. You can store any number of themes in the repository, and administrators can switch between them, providing an easy and quick way to change the user interface.
For deployments licensed to use organizations, administrators can set the theme individually on each organization, or rely on theme inheritance to use the same theme everywhere without needing to set it explicitly. The inheritance mechanism also supports a mix of explicit and inherited settings, so that you can override any setting or image in a local organization, but inherit the rest of the theme from the parent or system-wide theme.
This chapter contains the following sections: