The PreferencesBean is an application level bean that allows end users to set their preferences values. Preferences allows users to customize the application to their own settings.
Preferences are managed by the Preferences class, which is an application level object shared through the appContext class. The PreferencesBean is responsible to present the end-user graphical interface and to handle the events of updating the Preferences values.
Graphically, preferences are grouped based on the level and their usage. Usually for the level, we would have user and administrator preferences. User preferences apply only to the current user and project; administrator preferences are only available to administrator and are applied to all users. On the usage we have groups like General, Grid display, Graph display, etc. We have groups that only apply at the user level, such as History List; we also have groups that only apply at the admin level, such as Login.
The PreferencesBean extends the AppComponent (the base for all Application beans). It provides an initFromXml() method which receives a Node and creates the internal structures for groups and group-sets.
It provides methods to retrieve/set the current group/group-set based on its name.
It has an EventHandler, this event handler is the one responsible to receive the request, update the Preferences or set the current group/group-set from it.
Each group will define the transform it should use to render the preferences. The generateOutput() method (inherited from WebComponent) will check which is the current group, and will call its transform to generate the MarkupOutput.
The class also provides a method to return a MarkupOutput to use to render the groups list.
It implements Persistable. We would use this to save the state of the bean. On the state the current group and group-set are saved.

Application bean type for the Preferences bean

addPromptCustomStyle, loadProjectDefaults, removePromptCustomStyle, selectGroup, selectGroupSet, showAdvancedSettings, showColorThemePreview, updatePreferences, validatePreferences