This tutorial is a work in progress!

Overview

Type webskins are effectively views on a specific class of content type that are not concerned with a specific content item. They're ideal for things like groups of items or abstract views concerning a specific type.

For example, showing an archive of News articles by Year you might create a typewebskin and pass the year as a parameter on the URL. The type webskin doesn't act on a specific content item, it acts on the type itself.

History

Type webskins were introduced as part of the FarCry 5.0 release. However, this initial release was unable to properly leverage the object broker, and other internal services. FarCry 5.1 incorporates additional functionality that allows this to be possible. For all intents and purposes FarCry developers will only see the improvements and the underlying type skin machinery changes do not need to be understood.

farCOAPI Content Type

For those who need to know, typewebskins work through the farCOAPI object type, that auto registers all content types and rules in the system. Type skins are effectively run as a view on farCOAPI, that then in turn prepares and runs the correct view on the desired content type.

Usage

Type are stored in just the same way as a standard webskin. That is, stored in the content type's sub directory. Typeskins can be given any name but currrent best practice would have these named displayTypeSomeName where "SomeName" is something describing the skins function.

Example Type Skins	Description
./webskin/dmnews/displayTypeMonthArchive.cfm	Check URL for date parameter, and display all news articles published that month. If no date provided, show a drill down list of months.
./webskin/dmproject/displayTypeActive.cfm	Display a data drill down to all projects with a project status of active.

Calling a typeskin is very similar to rendering a standard content item view.

<skin:view type