doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Denis Laxalde <denis.laxalde@logilab.fr>
Mon, 24 Oct 2016 10:08:36 +0200
changeset 11746 7cf5a915e2e9
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
[devtools/qunit] Retain firefox process stdout to eventually print it The bare RuntimeError that gets emitted upon timeout does not help much to diagnose the problem. Let's see if we can get more information from stdout by not dropping it.
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Refactoring the CSSs with UI properties
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Overview
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=========
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Managing styles progressively became difficult in CubicWeb. The
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introduction of uiprops is an attempt to fix this problem.
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The goal is to make it possible to use variables in our CSSs.
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These variables are defined or computed in the uiprops.py python file
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and inserted in the CSS using the Python string interpolation syntax.
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A quick example, put in ``uiprops.py``::
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  defaultBgColor = '#eee'
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and in your css::
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  body { background-color: %(defaultBgColor)s; }
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The good practices are:
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- define a variable in uiprops to avoid repetitions in the CSS
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  (colors, borders, fonts, etc.)
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- define a variable in uiprops when you need to compute values
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  (compute a color palette, etc.)
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The algorithm implemented in CubicWeb is the following:
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- read uiprops file while walk up the chain of cube dependencies: if
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  cube myblog depends on cube comment, the variables defined in myblog
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  will have precedence over the ones in comment
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- replace the %(varname)s in all the CSSs of all the cubes
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Keep in mind that the browser will then interpret the CSSs and apply
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the standard cascading mechanism.