doc/dev/refactoring-the-css-with-uiprops.rst
author Sylvain Thénault <sylvain.thenault@logilab.fr>
Wed, 09 Nov 2016 11:42:33 +0100
branch3.24
changeset 11811 f09efeead7f9
parent 10492 68c13e0c0fc5
permissions -rw-r--r--
Fix broken flake8 configuration and flake8 errors which were hidden by this breakage. flake8 --filename options doesn't work as expected: * it's expected to be a shell pattern, using stdlib's fnmatch.fnmatch function internally. This funciton thinks that 'cubicweb/x.py' doesn't match 'cubicweb/x.py' (there must be a reason but that's not the point), hence no file was actually checked ; * as this is a list of pattern, each encountered file is checked against each pattern, leading to run time explosion. So maintain list of files to check in a separated file and give this list to flake8 using unix's xarg command.

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