Contributions are a powerful and easy way to enhance your application with e.g. widgets that had not (yet) found the way into the qooxdoo core framework. Nevertheless it is a no-brainer to use them in your application.

But if a contribution is providing its own theme (in most cases its own appearance theme) you have to manage this manually.

For an easiser understanding this tutorial explains the necessary setup at the example of the TileView widget.

The interesting part of the config.json looks like this:

...
"jobs" :
  {
    "libraries" :
    {
      "library" :
      [
        {
          "manifest" : "contrib://TileView/trunk/Manifest.json"
        },
       // as the tileView uses internally the FlowLayout you have
       // to add this to set it up correctly
       {
          "manifest" : "contrib://FlowLayout/trunk/Manifest.json"
        }
      ]
    }
  }
...

If you use the latest GUI skeleton template you will get an own appearance theme class (among all other theme classes) already setup for you. All you need to do is to include the appearance class provided by the TileView widget into your own appearance class.

Include the TileView appearance:

qx.Theme.define("yourApp.theme.Appearance",
{
  extend : qx.theme.modern.Appearance,
 
  // this include key does the magic
  include : tileview.theme.Appearance,
 
 
  // overwrite the appearances to customize the look of the modern theme
  // usually not needed
  appearances :
  {
  }
});

So all you need to add is this little include key with the corresponding appearance class to include it into your application.

The following code which could reside in your Application class won’t work:

qx.Theme.include(qx.theme.modern.Appearance, tileview.theme.Appearance);

The reason is that this include above will be resolved at runtime which does not work anymore. The first solution is resolved at loading time, so the include is already performed at startup. This issue is already file under #1604.