How can I change the styling/appearance of a TextButton in EXT GWT 3 ?
I am mostly interested in the background color.
Thank you, Horatiu
GXT 2x was easier ... but ... GXT 3 is supposed to be easier to maintain for large projects.
Sencha gives different ways for GXT 3 but the one I think I will use is to create an appearance and then pass it in via a constructor. Here is their example:
ContentPanel redContentPanel = new ContentPanel(new RedContentPanelAppearance());
The complete example is at:
Sencha's explanation and reasoning
Think you have to create your own appearance (based off an existing one and changing the bit you want) Not trivial it seems.
More reasoning on the Appearance usage is at gxt3 appearance explanation
Take a look at the style classes defined in ButtonCellBase.css and override them in your css.
Related
What's the best way to perform simple default styling?
I'm not interested in styling every single UI element in the interface builder and the UIAppearance proxy seems to be very limited. I am looking for solutions to default styling UI elements with low coupling.
note that i am using swift 3 / xcode 8
UIAppearance is the default styling mechanism in UIKit. It doesn't seem very limited to me, yet it indeed has some downsides. You should give it a try if you haven't yet.
If you're interested in a non-UIAppearance-based approach, it's possible to craft even more powerful custom styling mechanism. For example, I've been able to attach and compose styles in the following manner:
final class CaptionLabel: UILabel, CaptionFontStyle, MultilineLabelStyle
See Style.swift and RootStyle.swift in the StyleSheet library for implementation details (it's really simple and there is an example project as well).
I have learned that in iOS 5, properties that are marked with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR can be styled using appearance. Eg [[UINavigationBar appearance] setTintColor:....]. However, I seem not to be able to style all elements. UIButton, for instance, has no properties marked UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR, hence I am not able to use the above technique to style it.
My question is: How do I best style elements globally (all appearances in the application), when I cannot use appearance?
Right now I have defined some colors, fonts, shadow offsets etc. that I use many different places in my code. This allows me to change the look and behaviour of a lot of elements, but it still doesn't allow me to style all instances of a certain object with only one line of code.
Edit
In lack of better solutions I have created a number of categories with simple methods as the following:
+ (UIButton *)customLabelWithFrame:(CGRect)frame andText:(NSString *)text;
Also I have found that - in combination with the described categories - stretchable images are nice and useful.
With the above I am able to style in a global-ish manner, however I am not satisfied with the result and I still hope to find a better solution
What about standard subclassing or factory classes, as you mentioned yourself!?
For buttons I'm using factory classes myself.
I think a really nice solution could be the Android way of designing interfaces. Android relies on XML files to define the user interface. As a matter of fact, I'm working on a library that aims to give the projects I'm working on much the same capabilities. It's still a work in progress / experiment and as such really messy code (you have been warned!), but it might give you some ideas.
An example project can be downloaded here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/6487838/WSLayoutManager.zip
Experiment a bit with the XML files by adding controls. Create custom control classes and instantiate them from the XML file, etc... It's fun stuff :)
Is it possible to create a GWT form without manually specifying sizes of components ?
I'm looking for layout managers that work a bit like in Swing, where you can simply pack things in a panel with a proper layout manager and constraints and never care about size/width/height. However it seems like in GWT all typical layouts (eg. Dock, Horizontal/Vertical) either require size parameter or don't exist (GridBag, unless you count in very limited FlexTable).
Such layout exists in GXT, but I would recommend to use plain-old CSS + HTMLPanel. It will give you in the end the same result, but in a little bit different way.
I have posted this question on the Ext-GWT forums, I am just hoping that someone here might have an answer for me!
I am struggling to do something I initially thought was simple but am beginning to believe is impossible...
I have got a "layout template" of sorts - simply consisting of a few GWT DockLayoutPanel's within each other and finally ending in LayoutPanels. GWT's LayoutPanel is designed to size the widget (or Composite) that's added to it to its full size and does so perfectly with pure GWT widgets.
The idea of my "layout template" is that I don't know the EXACT height and width of the very inner LayoutPanel's because I may set certain panels sizes (of the outer DockLayoutPanels) differently when instantiating this template. All I would like is to add a Grid component to one of the inner most LayoutPanels and have it size itself (height AND width) to fit as normal GWT widgets do (works perfectly with a GWT Label for instance).
I am VERY new to GXT (as in I started using it earlier today) and I do realize that GXT builds its Components differently to the way GWT builds its Widgets on the DOM.
Is there anyway to achieve the desired result? I have tried adding the grid to a ContentPanel with a Layout of FitLayout, I have tried AnchorLayout, I have tried adding the grid directly... Nothing seems to work... Any advice or even a push in the right direction would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance!
Xandel
Just a note on this post and the direction I have taken. When I started my GWT project and I was learning the basics and reading through others posts and concerns and advice, the one bit of advice I overlooked initially was quite simple - when using the GWT framework use pure 100% GWT components only.
I initially ignored these fair warnings of fellow developers because in the age of open source tools, and open source projects, one develops the mind set of "Instead of building a tool which will give me certain functionality, let me rather see if someone else has done it already". This mindset speeds up development and almost standardizes projects and methods of implementation.
However, I have found over the last two months, that when working with GWT it is best to not follow this principle. Maybe because its not as widely spread as other frameworks, or demands a very certain type of coding style but non the less my search for a (simple, sortable, JSON loadable) grid component and (validating, neatly styled) form component has been nothing short of a nightmare.
This isn't because they don't exist. They do. I tried ext-gwt, gwt-ext, gwt-mosaic, and gwt-incubator. It is because many of the components break away from the very simple layout foundation that GWT provides (in other words, the panels that you place the widgets on mostly need to be the panels provided with the tools). This in turn makes mixing components and getting the desired result near impossible. Which in turn breaks away from the let-me-find-a-useful-component mindset.
Just an interesting and final point which I think might be worth mentioning. So due to my realisation of the above mentioned point, I set about to write my own grid and form components. Which I have completed and are working fine for me (obviously, because I wrote them , I don't suspect they will be useful to everybody else). But in the process of writing the grid component, and needing the columns to size and space themselves out automatically once drawn in their parent panel, I found that knowledge of the panels final width is not known until finally being drawn (this happens long after all your code executes). So ironically I set about building a set of panels that communicate to each other, from the parent panel (who ultimately NEEDS to have knowledge of its size) right down to the most inner panels so that when my grid component finally gets drawn, I can fire a method called onSizeKnown(int width, int height) and do whatever sizing is required.
After I completed this I could do nothing but laugh. Because it suddenly became clear to me why all the other GWT components out there require their own panels. I in essence had to do the same to get what I needed working.
So in short, if you are a newbie GWT developer like I was and are (is?) looking for cool stuff to make your project look awesome - this is my advice - if you are going to use an external framework such as some of the above mentioned - use ONLY that framework. Do not mix its components with other frameworks. Learn to love that framework, and build your project from the bottom up using their panels and design methods. If this scares you and makes you feel nervous and limited then do what I did and write your own using pure vanilla GWT components. You will save yourself A LOT of time in the long run by following this advice.
Xandel
This solution is for GXT 2.2.0 and GWT 2.0.4 *
While the original poster has since moved on I recently ran into this issue and thought I would post my solution in case anyone else stumbles on this.
There is no reason you can't add a GXT Grid directly to a GWT LayoutPanel. The problem is that the styling/positioning approach of the two libraries conflicts. Basically it boils down to the fact that the Grid is sized based on its parent's height attribute, which is not set meaning that the grid's body get assigned a height of 0 and the grid itself gets a height equal to that of the grid header (if present).
So the solution is to undo what GXT does once flow has passed back to GWT. Here is a template solution:
class MyGridWrapper extends Composite {
private LayoutPanel widget;
private Grid<?> grid;
public MyGridWrapper(Grid<? extends ModelData> grid) {
this.grid = grid;
widget = new LayoutPanel();
initWidget(widget);
widget.add(grid);
// Set the grid's vertical and horizontal constraints
// ... populate the rest of the panel
}
#Override
protected void onLoad() {
// onLoad is called after GXT is finished so we can do what we need to
// Redo what the LayoutPanel did originally
grid.el().setStyleAttribute("position", "absolute");
grid.el().setStyleAttribute("top", "0");
grid.el().setStyleAttribute("bottom", "0");
grid.el().setStyleAttribute("left", "0");
grid.el().setStyleAttribute("right", "0");
// Undo any height settings on the .x-grid3 element
El mainWrap = grid.el().firstChild();
assert mainWrap.hasStyleName("x-grid3") : "Wrong Element: " + mainWrap.getStyleName();
mainWrap.setStyleAttribute("height", "auto");
// Undo any height settings on the .x-grid3-scroller element
El scroller = grid.el().firstChild().firstChild().getChild(1); // FUN!
assert scroller.hasStyleName("x-grid3-scroller") : "Wrong Element: " + scroller.getStyleName();
scroller.setStyleAttribute("height", "auto");
}
}
The assertions are there to help protect against what is obviously very fragile code so beware that this is a GIANT, GIANT hack.
--
Just in case you're wondering where the GXT Grid's structure is defined, you can find it in a template file in the GXT JAR under com/extjs/gxt/ui/client/widget/grid/GridTemplates#master.html
Have a look at com.extjs.gxt.ui.client.widget.grid.GridView#renderUI() to get an idea of how the grid is built.
I'm learning to use GWT 2.0 and I'm trying to convert the StockWatcher demo to use the UiBinder. the demo uses stocksFlexTable.getRowFormatter().addStyleName(0, "watchListHeader"); to add styles, but when I add <ui:style> to my XML and move my CSS I can't seem to figure out how to make the style work because there is no stocksFlexTable.getRowFormatter().addStyle(). Does <ui:style> just not work with FlexTables?
I tried to deal with it as well with no success. I believe though that dynamic widgets such as FlexTable are not fully supported for obvious reasons - i.e. you can't preset the style for the nth row when you don't really know how many rows the table will hold. Also, providing some arbitrary way to do it for the first only, or odd rows etc. would require more expressive power than what the GWT developers seem keen to offer (they try to stick close to XHTML) and i believe they state at the wiki at somepoint that declarative syntax is by no means a templating language. Anyway, you can always experiment with #UiFactory and #UiField(provided=true) to try and stick close to GWT recommendations. But still, you ll have to set any such values programmatically.
I had success by removing the section completely and moving all of the css for the FlexTable into the application css file.