doc/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Aurelien Campeas <aurelien.campeas@logilab.fr>
Tue, 01 Jul 2014 16:55:49 +0200
changeset 10351 91e63306e277
parent 10121 23af005426bf
permissions -rw-r--r--
[connection] replace .running_dbapi_query with .hooks_in_progress The thing was badly named. It tries to help distinguish between queries issued directly by the programmer (e.g in the views: cnx.execute(...)) from queries issued from the hooks, operations ... or even the repository or the native source objects. It worked heuristically being associated with the security being disabled. We provide a better name and an implementation distinct from the security management methods. Related to #3933480.

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