Creating a MVC UI theme

A custom MVC UI theme can be created if the use of default Blueriq themes is not desired. This could be the case if for example you want to create your own client application and Extending themes is not sufficient.

Introduction

The MVC UI has two default themes (Forms theme and Dashboard theme) and has support for custom made themes. A theme is basically a set of files and some configuration that consists of the following components:

A theme can be part of a custom plugin JAR (for example the Dashboard plugin) but can also just be a collection of files located in spring.config.additional-location.

Getting started

The base of a theme is the index file from which the main page is build. Blueriq uses a template engine called StringTemplate to make server properties available in the client.

A default Blueriq index page is injected with a template context that features the following properties:

When creating a custom theme you need to provide a StringTemplate index file.

Creating the index file

The index file is the starting point of a custom theme and is a StringTemplate template that follows a certain structure. For full details on the StringTemplate syntax and usage please check the official documentation. The purpose of the initial page is to load all the required resources (e.g. JavaScript or CSS files) and to provide a base layout.

A StringTemplate index file in Blueriq has the following structure:

delimiters "$", "$"
main(context) ::= <<

[HTML]

>>

First the delimiters to use around StringTemplate variables are set to "$" instead of the default "<" ">" delimiters to be able to use variables within HTML. StringTemplate uses a function call to generate the template: main(context). The context object that is passed with this function call contains all properties as described above. In the function body (between "<<" and ">>") the actual index page is placed, which is a full HTML page.

Save the custom index file as a .stg file so it is recognized by StringTemplate.

Installation

Installing your custom theme is easily done by putting all files in the spring.config.additional-location folder. For example when a theme is created named "custom_dashboard" which consists of an index file, a JavaScript file and a CSS stylesheet, installation would be as follows:

Java

1. Create a UI/mvc folder in spring.config.additional-location and put the custom index file (for example custom_dashboard.stg) here.
2. Create a webresources/mvc folder in spring.config.additional-location and put the JavaScript and CSS files here (optionally in /js and /css subfolders).
3. Add a configuration section for your custom theme to aquima.properties in spring.config.additional-location root, as described in the Configuration section below.

.NET

1. Create a UI/mvc folder in the Configuration folder in the .NET webapp installation and put the custom index file (for example custom_dashboard.stg) here.
2. Create a webresources/mvc folder in the Configuration folder and put the JavaScript and CSS files here (optionally in /js and /css subfolders).
3. Add a configuration section for your custom theme to Web.config in the wwwroot folder, as described in the Configuration section below.

Configuration

In order to configure your theme so it will be known by the Runtime several properties must be set. The following example shows properties for registering a theme named "custom_dashboard" in both Java and .NET:

Java

mvc.themes=custom_dashboard
mvc.custom_dashboard.templateGroupFile=UI/mvc/custom_dashboard.stg
mvc.custom_dashboard.templateName=main

.NET

 <ui>
  <mvc developmentMode="false">
	<themes>
	  <theme name="custom_dashboard" templateGroupFile="UI/mvc/custom_dashboard.stg" templateName="main"/>
	</themes>
  </mvc>
</ui>

The mvc.themes or name property specifies the name for the theme which will be displayed in the Runtime theme selector. The other two properties specify which StringTemplate index file should be used and which StringTemplate function should be called to render the index page (see "Creating the index file" above). The path to the index file is relative to either the JAR/DLL or the spring.config.additional-location/Configuration folder. When a filename is specified which is located in spring.config.additional-location/Configuration and that is already loaded from a JAR, the file from spring.config.additional-location/Configuration will be used and the file from the JAR/DLL will be overridden. More information about overriding existing themes can be found on Extending themes.