Hi Sandi,
Here are some quick tips that you can keep in mind when developing a theme:
1 - You can take a look at the pre-created styles within Dundas BI. By default, you will find all of them under the shared folder within the styles folder. Here you can see the styles we created for every available pre-created theme within Dundas BI. It will give you an idea for which controls (control is a visualization or component) we usually create styles for.
2 - Another tip is to look at the groping within Data Visualization tab on your tool bar:
a) You can note that all of the charts are grouped together (all chart are within 2 vertical bars), and if you look at the property tab of different chart types, you can note that they are exactly the same. It means that we do not have different visualization settings by a chart type, so you can create a single style for ALL charts.
b) The same goes to relationships diagram and Sankey diagram.
c) The only exception is gauges. They have quite different properties, so every gauge type should have its own style in the theme.
3 - Another hint is that you should create the most usable/suitable styles and add only 1 style per control type. For example: if you have 2 label styles in a single theme, it’s always going to apply only one of this styles to all labels.
4 - One more thing that can help you to be organized when creating styles for a theme is to first, create a theme folder and add styles into this folder. Second, is to keep the name pf the style in a pattern similar to “<theme name> - <control type>”
5 - If you are the only developer within your company, then you can build styles gradually as the need arises during the process. However if you have multiple developers that are working on multiple dashboards at the same time, and they need to follow the same branding guidelines, we would recommend to create a theme first and apply it as a default one. It means that when developers will start working on the dashboards, they going to use the recommended styles by default (without a need to apply it) as soon as they start adding controls.
https://www.dundas.com/support/support-center/support-articles/configuration/setting-a-default-theme-for-controls
Then if the style needs a small tweak in a specific use case, the developer can do it directly on a dashboard for a specific control.
In regards of the data point palette, it is applied in the order from the first specified color to the last one. For example, in case of the multiple series in visualization, the first series is going to get the first color, the second is the second and so on. If you have more series than data point palette colors, then the palette colors are going to be repeated in the same order starting with the first color. In the case of 1 series with multiple columns, it’s going to use the same order for the columns: first column gets first color, second gets second and so on.
I hope it clears things a little bit.