multicolour-polymer

Polymer front end generator for Multicolour applications. Your CRUD operations are generated for you.

npm i --save multicolour-polymer

On installation; unless you have a content/frontend/src folder already, you'll see a new folder content/frontend/src which contains .jade files.

These files are the default theme for your frontend, before Multicolour will generate anything for you you need to add the below to your app.js.

my_service.use(require("multicolour-frontend-polymer"))
  .request("frontend").generate().watch()

That will do an initial generate and then watch all the files in the src directory and automagically reload the frontend for you.

Why Jade?

Jade is a simple dynamic language that allows you to generate dynamic content without switching technologies or ideologies. A Jade template in Multicolour is turned into HTML and lets you generate these templates while being able to access all model data, type data and backend functionality while writing your themes.

Customising your theme

Once Multicolour has done a generate, you'll see a content/frontend/build folder, this contains html. By default Multicolour:

1. Generates, per blueprint:

• {entity}/read.html
• {entity}/write.html
• {entity}/list.html
• {entity}/single.html

2. Generates an index.html and an elements.html
3. Generates a home.html
4. Copies

• bower.json & bower_components from src
• css folder
• js folder
• assets folder

Multicolour will use read.jade, create.jade, single.jade and list.jade to generate your frontend but you can override any of these for any blueprint by creating a folder with the same name as your blueprint. For instance, you'll see in your src directory a user folder which has list.jade in it. This is a custom list template for the user blueprint. You can do this for any of the default 4 templates, if it exists Multicolour will automatically find it and use it. Magic.

Adding new templates

You can add new, entirely custom theme files are still .jade files. Multicolour won't automatically pick these up but you'll find a frontend.json in your src directory. Inside of this file is an array of template names.

Notice the lack of an extension, by default home is a "directive".

What is expected of a "directive"?

A directive is a custom theme file that isn't one of the default 4 jade files. These templates should appear in your frontend.json files. It doesn't matter if they are in a folder or not but what you expect does. For example, if you have a cool-stuff/amazing.jade that you want rendering to html, add "cool-stuff/amazing" to the array in frontend.json and Multicolour will generate a cool-stuff/amazing.html for you.

What data is passed into Jade as it compiles my templates?

When (all) your templates are compiled data is passed from the backend to the template:

{
    attributes: { ... Blueprint attributes ... },
    writable_attributes: { ... Blueprint attributes without id, createdAt or updatedAt ... },
    name: Blueprint identity, i.e "user",
    config: { Contents of config.js },
    package: { Contents of package.json },
    type_to_html_input_type: Function to convert basic attribute types to HTML input types,
    api_root: Full url to API
}