doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Denis Laxalde <denis.laxalde@logilab.fr>
Thu, 27 Jun 2019 12:20:22 +0200
branch3.26
changeset 12677 9f03df82f8de
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
[autoform] Fix display_fields handling This follows-up on changeset b2ceb483e056 (present in 3.25 as well), in which AutomaticEntityForm.editable_attributes() was turned into a generator. In this method, in case display_fields is not None, we previously returned a list of (rtype, role); this was changed into a yield, but the change was missing a return after the loop in order not to go through the remainder of the function. Add tests for editable_attributes() method.

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