doc/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Julien Cristau <julien.cristau@logilab.fr>
Fri, 15 May 2015 18:06:03 +0200
changeset 10395 7e311ee8b5b0
parent 10121 23af005426bf
permissions -rw-r--r--
[hooks] manhandle the parsed rql query, not its string representation ... and add a groupby clause to make it actually work (the selection might well use an aggregate function, so we need to tell the backend to group on our target entity). Closes #5362574

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