doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Denis Laxalde <denis.laxalde@logilab.fr>
Fri, 01 Dec 2017 11:19:19 +0100
changeset 12244 6a71cb23f827
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
Disable pytest's logs reporting CubicWeb already prints captured logs in stderr upon test failure, so we get them twice. Until we fix our logging management, disabling pytest capture and restore brings the output level back to sanity.

=========================================
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.