grunt for SAPUI5 - gruntjs

I am configuring grunt for SAPUI5 project. I can configure grunt taks for minify, test and etc. I see there is grunt-ui5 grunt plugin but I am not able to understand what exactly this plugin is doing or useful to SAPUI5 projects.
Thanks

The grunt-openui5 plugin by SAP is documented at github.
It can be used to build UI5 themes and package components and libraries into preload-files.
UI5 tries to load most of the modules of a component or library with a single request from a component-preload.json / library-preload.json file. If it cannot find a preload file, it has to request all modules individually resulting in many many requests and thus poor performance.
grunt-openui5 is used to create these preload files. It also minifies the code while doing so.
The grunt-ui5 plugin is something inofficial which seems to do similar things. You would have to ask the author directly to get more information. I recommend to use the official grunt-openui5 plugin.

For ui5 applications it's not common to use the grunt task for minification , instead we use the grunt-openui5 task. It will create the preload file, which is a json object that contains the whole app.
{
"version":"0.0",
"name":"app name",
"modules":[
"control1": "code for control1",
"control2": "code for control1",
]}
When control1 is required, ui5 just uses the preload to get the code for control1. In this way, ui5 avoids triggering a new request. Anyway, If the preload file is not present, it will have to request control1.js .
If you want to see a real preload file, open any ui5 app and go to the network tab of the browser.
Using the grunt-openui5 plugin for grunt, it will do the work for you, and will give you as a result a library.css, rtl, library-parameters.json (same thing, but for themes) and the preload.json (for the js files).
Instead of using grunt-ui5, I would recommend you to use the the oficial plugin grunt-openui5!

grunt-openui5 is a really amazing grunt plugin created by bunch of SAPUI5 core dev team ;)
It mainly allow you to do 4 things:
create Component-preload.js (optimized and minified version of your app)
create library-preload.js (optimized and minified version of a custom library)
create a custom theme
create a local web server to test your app locally
I've covered it a little bit on my blog post Custom Control 101 if you want to check it out.
I'm using it in daily basis and you can read some of my blog posts about it.

Just a small remark: in the future, consider switching from grunt to gulp, as gulp is newer and faster. For SAPUI5 there are packages with same functionality in gulp, as ingrunt.

Related

What to use Assets vs Assetics in Symfony?

I'm a bit new to Symfony and I'm don't know what to use for my static file management. I have read about Assets component and the Assetics bundle.
I know that Assets just includes the files and Assetics is a bit smarter as it can combine files and compress images. But I already use compass to minify and combine the css files so therefore Assetics is not really required.
Version control so the url of the static files change to by pass browser cache, is done by both.
Assetics is removed from 2.8 or higher, does this mean it is not best practice anymore?
I need to generate urls on three places:
Twig -> Easy to do with both
Controller -> Found only a way to do this with Assets
In css files -> Believe it is with both not possible
Wat would be the best to use in my case, any advise?
Assetic can be seen as a way to easily apply filters and compile your assets. The asset component basically is used to manage URL generation. As you said, both nicely are integrated in Twig via extensions, and controllers via the services.
Our application uses compass too, but Assetic makes sure that the compiling happens at the right moment without the need of compass watch at the commandline.
Think most of your questions are answered on:
http://symfony.com/doc/current/cookbook/assetic/asset_management.html
and
http://symfony.com/doc/current/components/asset/introduction.html
I've been using the RjFrontendBundle to run the front-end CSS/JS build, and also copy other static content into place from Bower/NPM/local sources. It provides a VersionStrategyInterface for the Assets component that creates, and uses unique filenames in production (renaming the files with an embedded hash, via the GulpJS rev-all package). In dev, it uses the normal filename.
Within CSS files, you can still reference CSS/JS, via a url() function, and the pipeline will rename them appropriately in dev and live.
The GulpJS build tool is used to minify and otherwise prepare the plain files. It comes with a setup console command to build the initial gulpfile.js and can also watch and rebuild files, updating the browser as they are changed, which helps with front-end development workflow.
The trend is to use standalone front end tools such as gulp/grunt/sass instead of assetic. The reasons are (probably) as follows:
gulp / grunt are independent from the framework, providing the same workflow for the front end guy no matter what underlying framework is used for the backend.
assetic has a different workflow than most of the modern tools. It assumes that you will write your script/css includes in the templates. Migrating from assetic to gulp could be a pain for large project.
as your project grows, assetic can become kind of slowish... As that happens, you will stop pulling your assets from the controller and start generating them the way gulp or grunt does. In this scenario, gulp and grunt are just better tools.
assetic lacks some important features, such as including processed assets into HTML code (inline). Because of the way assetic works (twig tags), it might be difficult to overcome this.
As for generating the URLs: assets are just files in the filesystem. Write a function or twig extension to generate URLs to those files.

How to include only specific parts of UI Bootstrap using Grunt

I'm using the accordion, tooltips and transition components of UI Bootstrap.
I can create a custom build with the online tool on the UI Bootstrap website, which will create a minified and non-minified JS file containing only the components I selected, without overhead.
However, I don't want to use the online tool to compile my custom version of UI Bootstrap, instead I want to compile my own version locally, preferably using the tools I already use; Bower, Grunt and NPM.
So my question: How can I create my own version of UI Bootstrap locally?
bower install angular-ui-bootstrap, and then calling Grunt build in bower_components/angular-ui-bootstrap creates a UI Bootstrap build that includes all modules, there's probably a way to do the same with only a subset of the modules, but I could not figure this out.
It can be done by using the following command
grunt build:moduleName1:moduleName2:moduleName3....:moduleNameN
For example if you require the build to contain only tabs and buttons module , then the grunt command will be like
grunt build:tabs:buttons
The generated files will be present in dist folder
For the list of module names , check all folder names in src folder
The documentation for this is sparse , but if you check the Gruntfile.js , where they register the build task , they mention about how to build modules selectively
It is not as easy as I expected (and as it should be).
Take a look at the Gruntfile.js of the project. You will see that they do quite a lot. Converting HTML and CSS to JS, concating all the scripts in such way they are loadable by others. Moreover the file is quite difficult for orientation; it even includes custom tasks.
To mimic its behaviour I suggest this: Download it via Bower as you normally do. Copy its node dependecies to your package.json dependencies. Then copy the Gruntfile.js, change he routes, and try deleting some parts of the code until you reach a point when you cannot remove more lines without breaking it. It is not a nice way, it should be however successful.
If one had a lot of time, the build script is a good candidate for a deep refactoring. Moving custom tasks to standalone files (or projects), documenting the flow, and maybe implementing standard tasks for some steps (e.g. CSS minification).

How to exclude files from Meteor's generation of app?

Tl;dr : Is there an equivalent in meteor to .gitignore?
Yes, I am aware of using a leading '.' in the directory name to get meteor to exclude it. But using leading dot is not a solution in this case. Read below to understand.
Longer:
I would like to use Bower.io to install various browser plugins.
Ideally, I run bower in the client subdirectory. Bower does its thing creating the bower_components directory and pulls down the plugin (pick a random jquery plugin for example).
Many plugins include example html, demo css files, etc. to show how to use the plugin.
Unfortunately, Meteor wants to include all that stuff in the application. Which unsurprisingly causes problems.
My current solution is to have bower.io run in the project's parent directory. This is not ideal as I have to copy js/css files over from the bower directory to the meteor client directory. (yes, I could use soft links but then the files would be missing when pushing to production).
With only a few client plugins / css packages this is becoming quite annoying.
NOTE: Renaming files/directories retrieved by bower.io to have a leading '.' or using bower in a dotted subdirectory helps only marginally. I would then have to manually include the files needed.
Is this possibly a duplicate of How to exclude directories/files from Meteor's bundler?
If you want to define the way you name your files, you could try including a certain regex to match in the meteor bundler. Otherwise, maybe it's something that needs to be implemented on a framework level.
I also found this tutorial by Tri on integrating meteor and bower: http://tridnguyen.com/articles/meteor-and-bower/. Tri defines a new meteor package to specify the exact files required on the client.
The best solution, however, is move away from Bower as Meteor offers its own package manager at a framework level. Including the front end files that you need using Meteor packages would be the more productive solution in the long run, especially as the framework changes.

VS2010 Automatically rebuild minified .js/.css files

Problem:
I have been trying to integrate minification of javascript and css files in our VS2010 (.net 4.) projects. From what I hear, .net 4.5 and VS2012 will have minification build into the editor, so it will be as easy as setting a flag it will work. Unfortunately we are sill on VS2010 (.net 4.0).
Let me explain what I want to do and what I dont want to do.
I dont want to do big setups with classes/config file(s)/etc just to minify because all that stuff will have to be loaded on our build machine and even the build xml files might have to be modifies to make it work. Also, once we go to vs2012 and .net 4.5 all these configs/classes/etc will have to be discarded because vs2012 will have the build in functionality.
Here is what I think might be the best option. Since I am using the ScriptManager and it can already pull either a .debug.js (non-minified) or a .js (minified) script based on the build type, it seems all i need to do is to have some sort of (pre?) build event that will re-build a non-minified .js file into a minified one. Obviously the build event will have to call a minication module which would have to be installed on local computer (the YUI Compressor seems very nice). The module would update the minified .js file.
I have been reading about this, but I am getting a little bit lost. There are a lot of third party tools with bunch of setup and classes which I do not want to add.
Did anyone do something similar as I explained about?
If not what is the next best simple solution?
(By the way, if you are going to say move to VS2012/4.5, thats not a solution for us at this point)
Solution:
Thank you Parv Sharma for your answer.
I would just like to explain what I did so that it may help someone in the future.
I installed the Microsoft Ajax Minifier
Created a batch file to add minifer to ENVIRONMENT PATH variables: setx path /m "%PATH%;C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Microsoft Ajax Minifier"
Added the following pre-build events into my project:
ajaxmin $(ProjectDir)Script.js -out $(ProjectDir)Script.min.js -clobber
If Script.min.js does not exist, it will be created by the build event, but it will not be added to the project (not sure how to do that through the events).
When you add a new script file, mynewscript.js, just create a second blank file called mynewscript.min.js and add an pre-build event for it.
Using this approach the only thing you have to do to the build machine is run the Microsoft Ajax Minifier setup package and the batch file. Thats it everything else will be part of your pre-build events.
what you are looking for is probably this
http://ajaxmin.codeplex.com/documentation
by using this you would be able to use this third party tool as the minifier
after downloading the tool you have 2 options
1. edit the MSBUILD file to include building the js as per build event
OR 2. to attach this tool to VS and assign a key compbination to it.. this way you would be able to minify whenever you want just like we do F5 OR Cntrl-Shift-B
Attaching to VS is easy just to to external tools and in the Tools menu and add this tool with the required params

How to validate HTML/CSS files with grunt.js?

This is a noob question.
I would like to use grunt.js as a build tool for my web project. Can use grunt.js to validate my HTML/CSS files? Do you have an example of such a grunt.js file?
There is another plugin that seems to be updated more often and does not require java. grunt-html-validation. It has a number of options and has been working great for me. You can install and use it like this:
npm install grunt-html-validation --save-dev
Then put something like this in the initconfig of your Gruntfile.js
and this in appropriate places in your Gruntfile.js
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-html-validation');
grunt.registerTask("default", ["validation"]);
There is also a number of useful options including the ability to relax errors based on a regular expression (could be useful for AngularJS for example) and the ability to save a report.
You can use the grunt plugin grunt-html. Beware, you will need Java on your computer to use it. It works well for me.
As of now there seem to be two popular HTML validation plugins:
grunt-html-validation
grunt-html
grunt-html-validation uses the W3C Markup Validation Service and grunt-html uses a local copy of the java-based The Nu HTML Checker.
They both work well and have very similar options so it comes down to whether you want to wait for an external service call or wait for a local java app.

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