Guide applies to: classic

Theming The Ext JS Classic Toolkit

This guide is the continuation of the Ext JS Theming guide and is focused on the Theme API for the Ext JS Classic Toolkit, so please read that guide before proceeding. See the Theming The Ext JS Modern Toolkit guide for information about the modern toolkit.

Requirements

This guide assumes you have met all the Requirements described in the Ext JS Theming guide. To recap:

Setup

This guide assumes you have a workspace, the custom my-theme and the demo-app generated as described in the Ext JS Theming guide.

You should be able to watch the demo application using the following command (or run the sencha app build --development command to compile your styles):

  1. $ sencha app watch --fashion

After running sencha app watch you can pull up your application using the URL:

  1. http://localhost:1841/demo-app/

The --fashion switch will instruct the browser to refresh the styling within the application as you make changes to the application’s theme - often in under a second! Reminder: This Live Update feature is supported on modern browsers only (others will require a manual Reload to see changes).

Theming Components

As discussed in general in the previous guide, the Theme API for components consists of variables and mixins. The default appearance of a component is determined by its variables, while custom appearances can be defined and named by calling the “UI mixin”.

Configuring Theme Variables

Each themeable Ext JS component has a list of variables that can be used to configure its appearance. Let’s change the font-family of Panel Headers in my-theme. Create a file named my-theme/sass/var/panel/Panel.scss and add the following code:

  1. $panel-header-font-family: Times New Roman;

View your application now and you should see that the panel headers use “Times New Roman” font. You can find the complete list of variables for each component in the “Theme Variables” section of the component’s API documentation. For example, see Ext.panel.Panel and scroll to the section titled “Theme Variables”

Using Theme Mixins

All components in the Ext JS Classic Toolkit have a ui config property, which defaults to "default". This config property can be configured on individual component instances to give them a different appearance from other instances of the same type. This config is used within the Neptune theme to create different types of Panels and Buttons. For example, panels with the default ui have dark blue headers and panels with the ‘light’ ui have light blue headers. Buttons use ui‘s to give toolbar buttons a different appearance from regular buttons.

The theme-neutral theme includes Theme Mixins (or UI Mixins) for many of the different Ext JS components. You can call these mixins to generate a new ui for components. Available mixins for each component are listed in the API documentation. For example, see Ext.panel.Panel and scroll down to the “Theme Mixins” section to see what parameters the Panel UI mixin accepts. Let’s use this mixin to create a custom Panel ui.

Create a file named my-theme/sass/src/panel/Panel.scss and add the following to it:

  1. @include extjs-panel-ui(
  2.     $ui: 'highlight-framed',
  3.     $ui-header-background-color: red,
  4.     $ui-border-color: red,
  5.     $ui-header-border-color: red,
  6.     $ui-body-border-color: red,
  7.     $ui-border-width: 5px,
  8.     $ui-border-radius: 5px,
  9.     $ui-header-color: white
  10. );

This mixin call creates a new Panel ui named "highlight" which has a red header background, red bordering, 5px border, 5px border-radius, and white text. To use this ui, configure a Panel with 'highlight' as its ui property (along with frame: true). Open demo-app/app/view/main/List.js and replace its contents with the following:

  1. Ext.define('App.view.main.List', {
  2.     extend: 'Ext.grid.Panel',
  3.     xtype: 'mainlist',
  5.     ui: 'highlight',
  6.     frame: true,
  8.     requires: [
  9.         'App.store.Personnel'
  10.     ],
  12.     title: 'Personnel',
  14.     store: {
  15.         type: 'personnel'
  16.     },
  18.     columns: [
  19.         { text: 'Name',  dataIndex: 'name' },
  20.         { text: 'Email', dataIndex: 'email', flex: 1 },
  21.         { text: 'Phone', dataIndex: 'phone', flex: 1 }
  22.     ],
  24.     listeners: {
  25.         select: 'onItemSelected'
  26.     }
  27. });

View your application in a web browser and you should see the red “highlight” Grid.

While UI mixins are a handy way to configure multiple appearances for a component, they should not be overused. Each call to a UI mixin generates additional CSS rules. Excessive calls to UI mixins can produce an overly large CSS file.

Slicing Images for CSS3 effects in IE

In some themes, many components have rounded corners and linear gradient backgrounds. These effects are simple to accomplish in modern browsers using CSS3. However, Ext JS supports IE8 and IE9 and neither of these browsers support these effects (or do so in a way that makes combining the effects problematic).

Sencha Cmd closes this gap by rendering each component requiring these effects in a headless browser and slicing images from the corners and gradients for use as background images in the component markup in IE8/9. When adding custom ui‘s you’ll need to include them in the slicing manifest used by Sencha Cmd so that the component decorated with the custom ui will be sliced for use in IE8/9.

To do this, we need to tell Sencha Cmd which components and ui‘s need slicing. In order to create slices for the rounded corners of the “highlight” panel ui that you created earlier in the guide, edit the file named my-theme/sass/example/custom.js and add the following:

  1. Ext.theme.addManifest({
  2.     xtype: 'panel',
  3.     ui: 'highlight'
  4. });

Note: Multiple manifest entries may be added in the same addManifest call like:

  1. Ext.theme.addManifest({
  2.     xtype: 'panel',
  3.     ui: 'highlight'
  4. }, {
  5.     xtype: 'button',
  6.     ui: 'green'
  7. });

If you create an original component that requires slicing you’ll need to add any applicable ui configs to the slicing manifest as demonstrated above. You will also need to add config entries for the custom component using the Ext.theme.addShortcuts() call in custom.js.

The shortcut configs along with the ui‘s passed to the manifest will be used in rendering the custom component for slicing.

For a more detailed description of how to use Ext.theme.addShortcuts and Ext.theme.addManifest, refer to the inline documentation descriptions for each method found in my-theme/sass/example/render.js. You can refer to examples of addShortcuts for the framework components within the ext/classic/theme-base/sass/example/shortcuts.js file.

Modifying Image Assets

As an example of modifying an image asset let’s change the info icon of the MessageBox component. Save the following image as my-theme/resources/images/shared/icon-info.png. This image asset will take precedence over the one used in the parent Crisp theme at my-workspace/ext/classic/theme-crisp/resources/images/shared/icon-info.png.

Now modify your test application to show a MessageBox that uses the custom icon. Add the following tbar config to the “highlight” Grid in your application’s demo-app/app/view/main/List.js file:

  1. ...
  2. tbar: [{
  3.     text: 'Show Message',
  4.     handler: function() {
  5.         Ext.Msg.show({
  6.             title: 'Info',
  7.             msg: 'Message Box with custom icon',
  8.             buttons: Ext.MessageBox.OK,
  9.             icon: Ext.MessageBox.INFO
  10.         });
  11.     }
  12. }]
  13. ...

Now, view the app in the browser. When you click the “Show Message” button you should see that the MessageBox contains a friendly face.

Styling Your Application

Styling that is not shared between applications belongs in the application itself, not in the theme. Sencha Cmd provides an easy way to add application-level styling by allowing you to organize your styles right alongside your JavaScript code.

Styling Your Application’s Views

To write CSS rules associated with an application view, you create an .scss file in the same folder and with the same base name as the view. For example, to style the view App.view.main.Main, located in demo-app/app/view/main/Main.js, you would put that code in demo-app/app/view/main/Main.scss.

Let’s style the content of the Users tab in the App application:

  1. .content-panel-body h2 {
  2.     color: orange;
  3. }

Add the content-panel-body CSS class to the config of the Users panel in your application’s Main.js file:

  1. ...
  2. title: 'Users',
  3. iconCls: 'fa-user',
  4. html: '<h2>Content appropriate for the current navigation.</h2>',
  5. bodyCls: 'content-panel-body'
  6. ...

View your application and you’ll see that the h2 element in the Users view is now orange. While the ability to add arbitrary CSS styles offers maximum flexibility, any styling applied directly to elements owned by Ext JS components should be styled using the Ext JS theming API whenever possible. Using the theming API safeguards your styling against breaking markup changes in future versions of Ext JS.

Additional Notes

‘default’ Component Images

Various components have images relating the the component’s "default" ui (Buttons, Menus, etc.). When you create a custom ui for one of these components you’ll notice when the theme is compiled it warns that images for your theme were not found.

  1. WARNING: @theme-background-image: Theme image not found:

While refreshing the theme or app, Sencha Cmd will be looking for images using the ui name in place of "default" in the image name. For example, if you create a mixin ui with a name of "admin" for small Buttons, Sencha Cmd will warn that "admin-small-arrow.png" was not found.

The solution to this warning is to copy over any image assets with “default” in the file name from the theme you’re extending into the custom theme’s resources/images directory. You’ll then rename those files and replace “default” with the name of your custom ui. In the case of the "admin" button ui in your custom theme extending Neptune you would copy the "default" images from the ext/classic/theme-neptune/resources/images/button folder and paste them into packages/local/my-theme/resources/images/button/. You’ll then rename all "default" instances to "admin". For instance:

  1. $ mv default-small-arrow.png admin-small-arrow.png

Ext.button.Button

Button ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

Button scale can be configured as small, medium, or large with small being the default. When creating custom UIs for buttons you’ll need to provide a button mixin for each scale used in your application.

Note: The extjs-button-ui mixin should be avoided in favor styling buttons using the scale-specific mixins.

  1. @include extjs-button-small-ui(
  2.     $ui: 'green',
  3.     $background-color: green
  4. );
  6. @include extjs-button-medium-ui(
  7.     $ui: 'green',
  8.     $background-color: green
  9. );
  11. @include extjs-button-large-ui(
  12.     $ui: 'green',
  13.     $background-color: green
  14. );

The same applies when using the -toollbar button mixins. Each has a scale and should be included separately in the Button.scss file in order to support all button scales. Additionally, when working with the -toolbar button mixins you will need to add -toolbar to the ui config of the button in your application. Below is an example mixin for a small toolbar button mixin:

  1. @include extjs-button-toolbar-small-ui(
  2.     $ui: 'green',
  3.     $background-color: green
  4. );

which would decorate a button configured in a toolbar like:

  1. xtype: 'toolbar',
  2. items: [{
  3.     text: 'Toolbar Button',
  4.     ui: 'green-toolbar'
  5. }]

Ext.panel.Panel

Panels may be configured with frame: true and are frame: false by default. So, by default if you have a ui config of ui: 'highlight' then the resulting Panel.scss would look like:

  1. @include extjs-panel-ui(
  2.     $ui: 'highlight',
  3.     $ui-header-background-color: red,
  4.     $ui-border-color: red,
  5.     $ui-header-border-color: red,
  6.     $ui-body-border-color: red,
  7.     $ui-border-width: 5px,
  8.     $ui-border-radius: 5px
  9. );

However, this will only apply styling to non-framed panels. In order to style panels configured with frame: true and ui: 'highlight' you will need to add -framed to the $ui name in the Panel.scss file. Commonly both the framed and unframed ui versions will be represented in Panel.scss

  1. @include extjs-panel-ui(
  2.     $ui: 'highlight',
  3.     $ui-header-background-color: red,
  4.     $ui-border-color: red,
  5.     $ui-header-border-color: red,
  6.     $ui-body-border-color: red,
  7.     $ui-border-width: 5px,
  8.     $ui-border-radius: 5px
  9. );
  11. @include extjs-panel-ui(
  12.     $ui: 'highlight-framed',
  13.     $ui-header-background-color: red,
  14.     $ui-border-color: red,
  15.     $ui-header-border-color: red,
  16.     $ui-body-border-color: red,
  17.     $ui-border-width: 5px,
  18.     $ui-border-radius: 5px
  19. );

Ext.menu.Menu

Menu ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

Ext.toolbar.Breadcrumb

Breadcrumb ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

Ext.tab.Tab

Tab ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

When creating a tab ui be sure to include all applicable state vars you want to style including the -active tab states such as $ui-color-active, $ui-background-color-active, etc.

Ext.tab.Bar

TabBar ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

Note: When creating a TabBar ui with the extjs-tab-bar-ui mixin, you will need to create a corresponding tab-ui of the same name.

This will ensure that the tabs render properly in your theme. Not creating a matching tab theme may result in unpredictable tab rendering.

Ext.toolbar.Toolbar

Toolbar ui images will need to be copied from the parent theme to the custom theme when creating a custom ui. See the “‘default’ Component Images” section above for more detail.

Upgrading from Ext JS 5.x

While most of the updates to themeing occurred behind the scenes between Ext JS 5 and 6, there are a few changes to note when upgrading your theme.

Any variables defined in sass/etc/all.scss should be moved to sass/var/all.scss (or a .scss file @import-ed by sass/var/all.scss).

(recommended) Remove !default from the end of variable declarations

(recommended) Relocate your custom theme folder from the root packages/ folder in your application / workspace to packages/local/.