IgniteMarkup is an extremely simple XML structure that defines the way each page in a mobile application looks and acts. Every page in a Appcend app is a “view” and is configured by a XML file, using the definitions provided by IgniteMarkup.

For example, if you want to set a view’s background color to red, all you would have to write is:

<bc>ff0000</bc>

Every setting in IgniteMarkup consists of a wrapper tag (like bc, which stands for Background Color) and a contained value. Some wrappers are mandatory while others are optional.

An IgniteMarkup file typically consists of two areas, the configurations and the elements. The configurations are wrapped in a <cfg> tag and generally define how the view looks like - graphical settings, but also a few functional parameters. The elements are wrapped inside <es>; a view can have one or more elements inside it (for example, a list will have as many elements as there are cells displayed in it, while a webview has only one element that defines what is displayed inside it - a custom HTML or a web URL).

Apart from these two areas, you can also add three more root-level wrappers to the XML:

• one that defines the general action that should be performed when the user interacts with any element in the view (for example, when a user touches any photo in a grid, he should be taken to the slideshow),
• one that defines any launch actions for the view (when the app loads a certain view, you may want to perform a action, like displaying a alert to thank the user) and
• one that contains information about all the buttons present in the specific view.

Tipically, every page in your app will need to have its own XML definition. As a IgniteMarkup file also contains the view’s elements, if the content of the view changes periodically (like, for example, a list of news) you will need to write a script that connects to your data sources and dinamically generates the IgniteMarkup responce.