doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Sylvain Thénault <sylvain.thenault@logilab.fr>
Fri, 20 May 2016 17:05:39 +0200
changeset 11270 a9dc97b87ced
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
[devtools] set .config in setUpClass instead of using a cache in a classproperty This is much clearer and avoid problem with py.test introspection that triggered creation and caching of the configuration before actual test execution. This caused pb in unittest_postgres.PostgresStatementTimeoutTC where configuration was built before module's setup, hence source configuration was missing information about where to find the pg cluster.

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