Gentics UI Core

This is the common core framework for the Gentics CMS and Mesh UI, and other Angular applications.

Gentics UI Core 13.0.2 and up supports Angular 13.

Using ui-core in a project

1. Install via npm:

npm install gentics-ui-core --save

Note that npm will say that the foundation-sites package, which is a dependency of UI Core, requires a peer dependency of jquery and what-input. For the usage of foundation-sites within gentics-ui-core these peer dependencies are not needed.

2. Import the module and add it to your app's root module:

// app.module.ts
import { FormsModule, ReactiveFormsModule } from '@angular/forms';
import { GenticsUICoreModule } from 'gentics-ui-core';

@NgModule({
    // ...
    imports: [
        FormsModule,
        GenticsUICoreModule.forRoot(),
        ReactiveFormsModule
    ]
}
export class AppModule { }

3. Add the <gtx-overlay-host> component to your AppComponent's template if you want to use components that have overlay parts:

<!-- app.component.html -->
<!-- ... -->
<gtx-overlay-host></gtx-overlay-host>

4. Set preserveWhitespaces to true in your tsconfig.json or tsconfig.app.json. This is necessary for the default spacing between components.

{
    ...
    "angularCompilerOptions": {
        "preserveWhitespaces": true
    },
    ...
}

5. In your main.ts file enable preservation of whitespaces in the call to bootstrapModule():

// main.ts
platformBrowserDynamic().bootstrapModule(AppModule, 
  // Enable preservation of whitespaces for default spacing between components.
  { preserveWhitespaces: true }
).catch(err => console.error(err));

View Encapsulation

Do not use any ViewEncapsulation other than ViewEncapsulation.None (which is the default), because some UI Core components use the CSS ::ng-deep selector.

Lazy Loading of Routes

If you are using lazy loading of routes, the singleton services need to be provided again in the lazily loaded module, because otherwise they will not be found. For example:

// my-lazily-loaded.module.ts
// ...
@NgModule({
    // ...
    providers: [
        ModalService,
        OverlayHostService
        // ...
    ]
})
export class MyLazilyLoadedModule {
    // ...
}

Using ui-core in an angular-cli project

1. Create a new app using angular-cli (this guide assumes angular-cli version 8.x). The following command will create a new app with the name my-example in the folder ./my-example, use me as the prefix for components, set up a routing module, and use SCSS for defining styles. Please note that while a custom prefix and the routing module are optional, SCSS must be used for the styles in order to be compatible with Gentics UI Core.

ng new my-example --prefix=me --routing=true --style=scss

2. Uncomment (and if necessary, install) the polyfills required for your target browsers in polyfills.ts. Note that the SideMenu requires the web-animations-js polyfill in IE, Edge, and Safari:

/***************************************************************************************************
 * BROWSER POLYFILLS
 */
// Polyfills required by your target browsers.
// ...

/**
 * Web Animations `@angular/platform-browser/animations`
 * Only required if AnimationBuilder is used within the application and using IE/Edge or Safari.
 * Standard animation support in Angular DOES NOT require any polyfills (as of Angular 6.0).
 */
import 'web-animations-js';  // Run `npm install --save web-animations-js`.

3. Add the following assignment to polyfills.ts:

/***************************************************************************************************
 * APPLICATION IMPORTS
 */
// This is necessary, because GUIC uses the Intl library, which requires a global object (like in Node.js).
(window as any).global = window;

4. Follow the steps from Using ui-core in a project.

5. Add the following imports to your global styles SCSS:

// styles.scss
@import "node_modules/gentics-ui-core/styles/variables";
@import "node_modules/gentics-ui-core/styles/mixins";
@import "node_modules/gentics-ui-core/styles/core";

// ...

You can see the _variables.scss file for a list of variables, which you can override before importing the variables file.

Documentation

Full documentation and examples are available at https://gentics.github.io/gentics-ui-core/

Developer Guide

The following sections are intended for people, who want to contribute to Gentics UI Core.

The build system for the project is angular-cli with a custom directory structure (to maintain the previous directory structure before the migration to angular-cli) and a custom post-build gulp script. For full documentation on available commands, see https://angular.io/cli. Due to the post-build gulp script it is important to not use ng build directly, but always use npm run build.

The builder configured in angular.json is not the default one from angular-cli, but ngx-build-plus, because we need to be able to customize the webpack configuration.

Git Branches

There are two important branches in this project: master and maintenance-v6.x. From which one of these you need to create a new branch for development depends on what you want to work on:

• New Feature -> master branch
• Bugfix
  • If it is for a feature that existed already in version 6.x -> maintenance-v6.x branch
  • Otherwise -> master branch

Important: After merging a bugfix into the maintenance-v6.x branch:

1. Merge maintenance-v6.x into the master branch.
2. Run a test build on the master branch.
3. Run all unit tests on the master branch.
4. Test the bugfix manually in the docs app from the master branch.

Running the units tests

To execute a single test run for the gentics-ui-core library and the docs app, execute:

npm test

To run tests in watch mode for the gentics-ui-core library, execute:

ng test gentics-ui-core

To run tests in watch mode for the docs app, execute:

ng test docs

Building the docs app

Although the UI Core is intended to be consumed in a raw (uncompiled) state, there is a demo app included under src/demo which will serve as a "living style guide" as well as a way to manually test each of the core components.

1. npm install
2. npm start

This will rebuild the docs app on every change to the source files and serve the output on http://localhost:4200.

Releasing

1. Bump the version in projects/gentics-ui-core/package.json to the desired value
2. git commit -am 'vX.Y.Z'
3. git tag vX.Y.Z
4. git reset --hard HEAD^
5. git push origin vX.Y.Z master

Publish to npm

1. npm run build -- gentics-ui-core
2. npm publish ./dist/gentics-ui-core

Maintaining documentation on GitHub pages

Documentation is built as a static Angular app into "docs" and maintained on the branch "gh-pages". The easiest way to manage the branch is to check it out in the "docs" subfolder:

# check out ui-core twice, master in ./ and gh-pages in ./docs
git clone -o github -b gh-pages [email protected]:gentics/gentics-ui-core ./docs
# build the docs (if you want to create separate version of the docs, you need to append --docsVersion=vX.x param)
npm run build -- docs --prod=true
# commit and push gh-pages
cd docs
git add .
git commit -m "Update latest docs to vX.Y.Z"
git push github