I am new to GWT and am having a hard time finding any good tutorials focused especially on teaching styling with GWT. The few examples I've found provided by Google are rather paltry, and don't really explain much.
Some things I'm trying to do would be:
Change the global font style
Change existing widgets' styling, such as the background color of a
selected item in a CellTree
Replace a button's text with an image instead
Remove borders of text fields
the list goes on
I've been searching and searching, and am not finding anything particularly helpful with styling, so any advice/direction would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!
Styling in GWT is done almost entirely with CSS. You can link an ordinary CSS file to your host html, as you would with a normal website, and its rules will apply just as normal CSS does with normal HTML. GWT provides a couple of ways to optimize your CSS, and that gets pretty complicated, but at a basic level you can just use Firebug to look at the HTML of your app, figure out what CSS you need from that, and throw it in your css file. GWT applies many special styles to the widgets that come built-in, and you can learn all of those style names from the generated HTML and the documentation.
Related
I'd like to display rich text content in my app. I want user to create simple WYSIWYG input with support of bold, italics, shadow, outline, image HTML-like tags. I am puzzled if I should go with UIWebView or custom written UILabel/UIView which can have CoreText framework added to support all those above stated properties. I see there are libraries which are using both approaches.
Does anyone have an experience dealing with these approaches who can suggest cons and pros? Thanks
The web view approach has quite an overhead and likely a delay to display the rendered text. I would recommend using DTCoreText.
Ok im struggling to find anything on this as im probably searching the wrong keywords.
I have a backed form thats use to display content on a page. When entering the details i want to be able to use a basic text editor to style the text, like bold, bullets, underline.
On top of that i would also like to allow them to wrap section in paragraph tabs, apply a certain style i.e style id="x".
Its more for backend so it doesnt have to be really user friendly but if there was an uncomplicated way of showing the styles in the form as i apply them, basically a WYSIWYG view. If not i will settle for applying the styles without having to see all the hmtl and css tags in the editor but when the information is passed via the INSERT query it will show pass all the relevant code like My Style and so on.
Now im quite happy to spend the time learning how to do this if you point me in the right direction but i have no idea what keywords to search. Ideally if there is a script out there i can just edit to my needs would be great too rather than starting from scratch.
Finally since im learning php and mysql still keeping it dumbed down will help and also since my values im passing is going to be full of characters the code wont like what functions should i look up to pass the code and content into the database to avoid breaking the code
I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but it seems you can achieve what you want using an editor like for example TinyMCE in combination with JQuery?
With JQuery you can show/hide items and ander your css like
$("p").mouseover(function () {
$(this).css("color","red");
});
In our project we decided to try to design our UIs with UIBinder instead of doing everything in Java mixing GWT widgets and logic. We found out how much prettier they look panels, buttons and such from scratch, which saves a lot of time especially for presenting a demo. However, when we use number box widgets, like IntegerBox or DoubleBox, they don't appear as pretty as TextBoxes, they are like plain HTML boxes, thus quite ugly in contrast with the rest of the widgets. We did some Google search but nothing came up about this topic.
Is there any trick to accomplish this, to use GWT native number boxes with UIBinder and to appear in the pretty style? Or maybe we should just use TextBoxes for everything and write our own wrappers for setText-getText and parse the values.
This is really important as we have to make client-side calculations with input numbers before sending data back to the server.
UIBinder is not in any way responsible for things looking "pretty", it only generates Java code, the same kind of code that you were coding by hand previously. If things look "prettier", it's likely because you <inherits>-ed a theme in your gwt.xml.
Contrary to TextBox though, IntegerBox and DoubleBox don't have an associated hard-coded style name. If you want to have them style the same as every TextBox, you can then simply addStyleName("gwt-TextBox") to them (the hard-coded style name of the TextBox widget), or in your ui.xml: <g:IntegerBox addStyleNames="gwt-TextBox" … (note the plural here; this is documented in UIObject's javadoc).
I'm fighting to understand the weird behavior of GWT Layout Panels. I'm wondering how GWT translate Layout logic into javascript and html. sometimes we don't get the expected Layout . something under the cover is done by GWT compiler.
the GWT documentation is not clear enough on how Layout is performed under the cover.
is there some good books or tutorials that explains well the GWT Layout issues?
thanks.
I don't know about good books or tutorials but here's a little information that may be helpful.
First, as you may know there's a big difference between the FooPanels and the FooLayoutPanels. These are two different sets of panels that are based on different layout mechanisms. The Layout Panels are the new stuff that seems to be suited better for layouts that have hard-coded sizes, Google Wave style. The older FooPanels (VerticalPanel, etc.) are based on HTML tables mostly.
FlowPanel - this is simply something that outputs your widgets as successive HTML elements in a single DIV. As documented: "A panel that formats its child widgets using the default HTML layout behavior".
DockLayoutPanel - Looking at the code shows that it hard-codes the sizes of the different regions according to what you specify in the children (north, east, etc.)
Finally - my experience has led me to abandon all usage of the Layout Panel system and rely only on HTML and CSS wherever I can. This means using HTMLPanel + UiBinder mostly and sometimes FlowPanel, rarely also some of the other panels.
Trying to understand and battle the Layout Panel system to do things that are not the "default case" was a waste of time. I'm not saying it's the best thing to do, but I just couldn't get the kind of control I wanted without this - especially with regard to elements that should automatically expand vertically. If you haven't already, take note of this from the GWT documentation about Layout Panels:
The panels described above are best used for defining your application's outer structure — that is, the parts that are the least "document-like". You should continue to use basic widgets and HTML structure for those parts for which the HTML/CSS layout algorithm works well. In particular, consider using UiBinder templates to directly use HTML wherever that makes sense.
Does anyone know of a GWT widget that works like a spelling suggestor?
Ideally it would be similar to this: http://www.polishmywriting.com/
I need a click-triggered popup on user generated text so that I can suggest replacements (I am not building a spell-checker, but something similar). I also really like the way the polishmywriting menu is set up (when you click on an underlined word).
Is there a widget that would allow me to make something similar?
Basically I'm trying to clone the little popups used by spellchecking in Gmail and polishmywriting.
If not, what would be my first step to make it?
Thanks for your time and answers,
DTrejo
Have you had any luck yet? I know it's been quite a lot of time, but found this just now.
It is a very specific widget, so maybe you won't be able to find exactly what you are looking for. In that case, making one from scratch might prove as a challenge.
The first thing you will notice is that a regular gwt TextArea won't do the job of holding the text. You will need something more flexible to dynamically put clickable labels in the text itself.
TinyMCE is a platform independent web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control, released as Open Source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyMCE
There is also a gwt wrapper available, so you might find that useful:
http://code.google.com/p/tinymce-gwt/
If you check the polishmywriting editor after the spell checking markup is displayed, you will notice it is not a TextArea. The text is a series of paragraphs and the labeled parts are span elements. This are the elements you can easily access with gwt and put some click handlers there to open the popup.
And for the popups, it shouldn't be difficult. Use a standard gwt PopupPanel. The popup panel can be displayed in a relative position to other elements displayed on the page:
popup.showRelativeTo(otherElement);
If you did find something useful in the mean time, feel free to share.