doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Julien Cristau <julien.cristau@logilab.fr>
Mon, 04 Jan 2016 10:36:57 +0100
changeset 11045 615163b17558
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
[ldapfeed] extid and cwuri aren't the same thing Historically, we used a ldap://... URI as cwuri attribute, not just the dn. The extid field, OTOH, was always the dn. So when initializing our dict of known entities from an ldap source, look at existing extids, not cwuris, to avoid importing already-existing users (and violated unicity constraints).

=========================================
Refactoring the CSSs with UI properties
=========================================

Overview
=========

Managing styles progressively became difficult in CubicWeb. The
introduction of uiprops is an attempt to fix this problem.

The goal is to make it possible to use variables in our CSSs.

These variables are defined or computed in the uiprops.py python file
and inserted in the CSS using the Python string interpolation syntax.

A quick example, put in ``uiprops.py``::

  defaultBgColor = '#eee'

and in your css::

  body { background-color: %(defaultBgColor)s; }


The good practices are:

- define a variable in uiprops to avoid repetitions in the CSS
  (colors, borders, fonts, etc.)

- define a variable in uiprops when you need to compute values
  (compute a color palette, etc.)

The algorithm implemented in CubicWeb is the following:

- read uiprops file while walk up the chain of cube dependencies: if
  cube myblog depends on cube comment, the variables defined in myblog
  will have precedence over the ones in comment

- replace the %(varname)s in all the CSSs of all the cubes

Keep in mind that the browser will then interpret the CSSs and apply
the standard cascading mechanism.