Template:Taxobox colour/doc

Note to template editors : Edits to the taxonomic terms (taxa) in this template depend for their effect in manual taxoboxes on the colour-determining taxon being at a rank allowed to change the taxobox colour by Taxobox, so this may need altering. Colours must be defined using the rgb(..,..,..) format to enable Sets taxobox colour to work correctly.

Purpose
This template is one of a number of configuration templates used in the taxobox system, in this case in both manual and automated taxoboxes.

It generates the appropriate colour for a taxobox.

It should only be used by other taxobox templates.

Use by taxonomy templates
Manual taxoboxes call this template from Taxobox, which looks at the values of ranks given in the taxobox from phylum upwards and uses the taxobox colour for the first colour-setting taxon found (or the error colour if none is found). Sets taxobox colour is used to decide whether a taxon is colour-setting, which it does by using this template.

Automated taxoboxes use a function in Module:Autotaxobox, which finds a colour-setting taxon by searching up the taxonomic hierarchy coded in taxonomy templates (i.e. templates with names of the form "Taxonomy/taxon-name").

Setting colour within a taxobox
Both manual and automatic taxoboxes usually generate their colours automatically. If this fails, or if for some reason the automatically generated colour should be over-ridden, color_as can be used to set the colour based on a supplied taxon. Thus: | color_as = Animalia within a taxobox forces its colour to be the one appropriate for animal taxoboxes. The taxon given as the value of color_as must be in the switch statement in this template. Thus Felis fails and assigns the error colour.

Supporting templates

 * Template:Sets taxobox colour
 * Template:Taxobox/Error colour