Visual Studio code

This is the IDE that we all use for development and is a very powerful tool.

If you haven’t already, download and install the latest version of Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code - Code Editing. Redefined Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Visual Studio Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Node

This is required for running gulp when we wish to make customizations to the code. Download and install the latest version. (For any version below 2.5, the latest version of node that we can run is version 10.

Install Node Packages

This is most easily done through a terminal when running the Visual Studio Code.

It needs to be run from the webapps\UX_Custom folder that you wish to customize.

This will install all of the packages defined in the package.json file that we need for gulp to work.

Gulp

Install gulp globally. This is most easily done through a terminal when running the Visual Studio Code.

This enables the automatic compilation of SASS and custom JS files.

Gulp is only required if you are modifying SASS files or in need of supporting ie11… if you wish to add some entries into a CSS file, then this will work as well… you will just be a bit more limited in what you can achieve. Once this is done you can run gulp from the terminal window: Leave this running in the terminal and any changes you make will be automatically compiled into the required files that the browser will pick up on a full refresh.

Stylesheet customization

In ApliqoUX we use SASS https://sass-lang.com/

Sass is completely compatible with CSS, so you can happily write CSS as you know it in a Sass (scss) file. If however, you are not syntactically correct then the gulp process will show an error message upon saving.

Sass offers some very nice features over basic CSS, so it’s worth spending a little time to understand what makes it so good.

Here is a link to the Sass basics which will give you a good starting point Sass: Sass Basics

The 2 main things you will need to use are

variables (Sass: Variables) colour functions (Sass: sass:color)

How to find variables or CSS that needs to be modified

For example, if you wish to change the color of the active item in the menu but you don’t know what the sass variable name is you need to inspect the item in chrome.

Then under the styles tab, you will see information similar to the following:

Click on the _adm-view.scss:1223 to look at the Sass file

From this, you can see that the variables that you are interested in are:

$dropdown-link-active-bg

$dropdown-link-active-border-color

You just need to redefine what these are equal to in the _custom-variables.scss fie.

What if there is no Sass variable is defined?

Within our codebase, there has been an attempt to define all colors to Sass variables. Unfortunately, this will not always be the case.

If this is the case then you will need to create some CSS that redefines the color.

You can copy the CSS and change the required setting and save it into the _custom-style.scss file.

Please only copy that which you wish to change, otherwise, this may have an undesirable effect in the future.

If you are needing to do this then, please raise an issue with the Apliqo team so that the code can be improved for future customizations.