It seems it isn't possible at runtime to change styling defined in CSS files, ex.: colors. This is seemingly because the CSS files are compiled into SWF.
Is it possible to externalize styling information in CSS (or any other format) without compiling it to SWF file so that it can be changed easily at runtime just as normal CSS can be changed when it is used in HTML.
You can do this in Flex 3, Loading an external CSS file and hopes similarly can be used for Flex 4 as
Load CSS File using URLLoader
List item Parse it with StyleSheet parseCSS function
Assign it to Application
Also see StyleSheet
Hopes that helps
We eventually found a way of applying styling, without having a compilation step. We are sticking to basics.
We defined a configuration XML file and using onPre method of mx:application we read this XML file and applied the styling to UI components.
This approach ensured that the styling is centralized at least at application level and most importantly it is now possible to quickly try out new styles by changing the configuration file and refreshing the page.
I suppose this documentation answers all your questions. You have to use some CSS at compile time but you can load and apply another one at runtime without problem.
Related
I am very new to Angular and currently I am trying to add styling to an existing project.
The project has been constructed using components. So for each page there are 4 files,
mypage.component.css
mypage.component.html
mypage.component.spec.ts
mypage.component.ts
I can easily style the page by adding the styles to the css file in the component and the page style works perfectly.
However the issue is there are many pages that require the same styles again and again.
I can copy and paste the same styles to each css file and it works.
But this is not the most elegant or efficient way to do this.
I want to know what the correct way to add a global.css file so that it can be accessed by each page. So that way the css is only written once.
I have googled but haven't found anything that explains how to do it in simple ways.
Thanks
Angular adds the style.css/scss file by default to your project once you created it using the ng new command, and include it within the angular.json config file to be available across the components of the project.
So you can add any global styles within src/styles.css(or scss) file, to be implemented everywhere.
you can add your generic css into style.css/style.scss.
I'm using GWT in a new project that I'm working on and I'm facing a problem. Some of the CSS rules were defined into the XML file and not into a CSS file.
The problem is that when GWT compiles the code, my name classes defined into my XML file are changed to a new random ID.
Stuffs like GKA-VPPBPE or GKA-VPPBLE
Is there is a way to keep the original name instead of the generated ones?
The generation of obfuscated css classnames is a feature.
GWT has enabled CSS obfuscation activated by default. This will help reduce the download size and also reduce collision of css-classnames.
You can disable this in general:
<set-configuration-property name="CssResource.style" value="pretty"/>
Or for some classes only:
#external .myClassName
Look here for some more information
https://vcfvct.wordpress.com/2013/10/04/disable-obfuscation-in-gwt-css-resources/
As stated by Rob Dodson, style tags are now unavoidable with Web Components. I am trying to find a way to use LESS with this new tecnhology without having to paste the compiled CSS in my HTML document everytime I change something in the LESS file . Is there anyway to achieve that?
I am using Polymer.
Thanks!
Laurent
You can make the client compile the LESS to CSS , you should definitely take a look at this :
http://lesscss.org/#client-side-usage
It is advised to compile it yourself to css in a production environment though !
Doing this client-side hardly seems like the corrent solution, especially at scale. For instance, do you really want 1000 web components in your app all including LessCSS and compiling on the client side?
Just compile server-side and include the compiled version in your html import. Apps like DocPad, make this a lot easier. For instance:
src/documents/components/my-component/my-component.css.less is your source file, and is compiled to out/components/my-component/my-component.css, which is accessible at /compoennt/my-component/my-component.css.
We use this workflow to also make use of javascript pre-processors like coffeescript, as well as post-processors like css auto prefixer, and bundlers like Browserify. See: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23050527/130638 for more info.
Simply compile your less and embed the generated CSS file via good old link tag.
I don't think that rob wanted to say that using style tags is the only way to go. You can still link to external stylesheets as you always did.
Why don´t you compile on server side using php compiler? Have a look here - http://leafo.net/lessphp/ -
To let you know, i´m using this compiler on my projects, on the server side without any kind of problems!!!!!!! :) IMO, it´s better to have the compilation work on the server side. I´m not totally 100% sure, but i think IE8 don´t recognize text/less
The way I have done this before is have individual .less or .scss file for each component and have it compile into the individual .css file which is then called into the respective component file. and finally vulcanize everything into a single file.
Incase you want to use a single CSS file, then use //deep// combinator or ::shadow pseudo elements in the CSS.
If you able to create the custom elements without using ShadowDOM then you can simply have all your less merge into a single CSS.
Honestly speaking I was unable to create a wc without shadowDOM in polymer. There is a long conversation on github on enabling / disabling and hacking a way to create a wc without shadowDOM here https://github.com/Polymer/polymer/issues/222
One solution would be to have the preprocessor translate .less files into .css and then linking them inside Polymer components, like explained in the official documentation: https://www.polymer-project.org/1.0/docs/devguide/styling#external-stylesheets
Unfortunately this is deprecated. So the other way to go could be to have another step that wraps the preprocessor-generated css files with a dom-module: this way you can follow the Polymer way including the style module inside your components, or using the css file compiled from less if you do things outside Polymer components.
I'm using Gulp for my build process and I found this module very useful:
https://github.com/MaKleSoft/gulp-style-modules
It creates, for every .less file I have in my sources, an .html file with a dom-module wrapped around it, ready to be included in the components' styles.
I know that there are questions regarding this same topic, but for HTML. What are some good conventions in regards to using external stylesheets in a Flex app.? How would you break up the stylesheets (names of stylesheets and what they include)?
Flex compiles the external CSS file when you publish your project.
There is a way to load CSS at runtime using Flex; it can be done by compiling CSS files into SWF files and load them at runtime using StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations.
See the LiveDocs on Stylesheets at Run Time for more info.
Some conventions we use in organizing stylesheets:
Have one main.css stylesheet that holds all of the data for skinning the base application.
Have one fonts.css stylesheet to store all of the fonts in the main app, because these can get quite messy.
The main.css stylesheet is included in the main swf via the <mx:Style source="main.css"/> tag. We load our app with as little as possible, and once everything is loaded, if we need to immediately show some text (sometimes we just have a video playing if it's an advertising site), we fade/tween in the main elements and load the fonts.css via StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations at runtime.
If we have an admin panel, we have an admin.css stylesheet which we load at runtime because the main app doesn't need it.
We don't need to divide up the CSS anymore than that because we usually create a whole set of skins in a Theme, so the stylesheet is just applying those skins to components and is pretty lean (using Flex 4). I tend not do divide stylesheets into anything smaller (like "pages.css", "comments.css", "popups.css", or even "controls.css", etc.) because it would be overkill and too much to manage for little in return. That's common with HTML, but that's because HTML requires CSS for nice presentation; Flex could do without CSS entirely.
When developing, one of us usually develops most of the skin right away (having a default wireframe setup, like those found on ScaleNine as they do the photoshop/flash/after-effects. There's no way to not have to recompile the css swf if you make changes. But if it is loaded at runtime, you only have to recompile the css file and not the main swf, which is useful but not really useful during hardcore skin development.
I tried keeping the main stylesheet separate during development (in a custom Theme), and it made development a LOT harder, because I had to recompile the css separately every time I made a change and sometimes I had to recompile the main app too, and there were strange and hard-to-track-down bugs, etc. Then I was compiling two different apps. So I recommend keeping the main css file part of the main app.
If you wanted runtime css without having to recompile anything, try Ruben's CSS Loader and check out the source. But that would come at a runtime performance cost.
Flex is not something I've dealt with, but I did some research. It looks like the code to call a remote stylesheet is this:
<mx:Style source="com/example/assets/stylesheet.css" />
Flex Quick Start: Building a simple user interface: Styling your components says this:
Note: You should try to limit the
number of style sheets used in an
application, and set the style sheet
only at the top-level document in the
application (the document that
contains the tag). If
you set a style sheet in a child
document, unexpected results can
occur.
The implication of this seems to be that multiple stylesheets are not really possible. It sounds like what you want to do is organize your stylesheets, check out Organizing Your Stylesheets and Architecting CSS for some ideas for approaches. It looks like you have classes and basic tags, but the W3C stylesheet specifications are different from the Flex stylesheet specification.
As a non-Flex developer, Namespaces looks interesting as a way to organize namespaces: How to use the new CSS syntax in Flex 4.
I have a DotNetNuke skin that has a single CSS file over 3,500 lines long. It contains styles for YUI, Telerik, Cluetip as well as the actual customisation of the site. The old developers just kept adding styles and never cleaned up the old unused ones.
I want to cleanup the file and get it to a more managable size. I first thought about scanning through the code base but this is 5,500 files with a mixture of CSS applied in the .aspx, .ascx and .cs files as well as jQuery aplying styles sometimes from generated code and sometimes from js files. Some styles are applied with class selectors and others with id selectors.
Is there a way I can easily check just which styles the website actually needs across all of its pages? Is there some crawler that could do this?
For firefox there is an add-in called dust-me-selectors. If you provide a sitemap, it will find all unused css styles.
If you run dust-me-selectors, remember to run it in every page of your website so you don't delete any styles that are actually used.