Frontend Guide

This guide intends to explain the essential details of the frontend application.

Visual debug mode and utilities

Debugging a problem in the viewport algorithms for grouping and rotating is difficult. We have set a visual debug mode that displays some annotations on screen, to help understanding what's happening.

To activate it, open the REPL (shadow-cljs cljs-repl main) and type

(ns uxbox.util.debug)
(debug-all!)  ; to enable all visual aids
(debug! <option>)  ; current options are :bounding-boxes :group :events :rotation-handler

Then you need to refresh the screen, for example by selecting some shape with the mouse.

You can deactivate debug mode with

(debug-none!)  ; to disable all visual aids
(-debug! <option>)  ; to disable only one

There are also some useful functions:

(dump-state) ; to print in console all the global state
(dump-objects) ; to print in console all objects in workspace
(logjs <msg> <var>) ; to print the value of a variable
(tap <fn>) ; to include a function with side effect (e.g. logjs) in a transducer.

Icons & Assets

The icons used on the frontend application are loaded using svgsprite (properly handled by the gulp watch task). All icons should be on SVG format located in resources/images/icons. The gulp task will generate the sprite and the embedd it into the index.html.

Then, you can reference the icon from the sprite using the uxbox.builtins.icons/icon-xref macro:

(ns some.namespace
  (:require-macros [uxbox.builtins.icons :refer [icon-xref]]))

(icon-xref :arrow)

For performance reasons, all used icons are statically defined in the src/uxbox/buitings/icons.cljs file.

Translations (I18N)

How it Works

All the translation strings of this application are stored in resources/locales.json file. It has a self explanatory format that looks like this:

{
  "auth.email-or-username" : {
    "used-in" : [ "src/uxbox/main/ui/auth/login.cljs:61" ],
    "translations" : {
      "en" : "Email or Username",
      "fr" : "adresse email ou nom d'utilisateur"
    }
  },
  "ds.num-projects" : {
    "translations": {
      "en": ["1 project", "%s projects"]
    }
  },
}

For development convenience, you can forget about the specific format of that file, and just add a simple key-value entry pairs like this:

{
  [...],
  "foo1": "bar1",
  "foo2": "bar2"
}

The file is automatically bundled into the index.html file on compile time (in development and production). The bundled content is a simplified version of this data structure for avoid load unnecesary data.

The development environment has a watch process that detect changes on that file and recompiles the index.html. There are no hot reload for translations strings, you just need to refresh the browser tab for refresh the translations in the running the application.

If you have used the short (key-value) format, the watch process will automatically convert it to the apropriate format before generate the index.html.

Finally, when you have finished to adding texts, execute the following command for reformat the file, and track the usage locations (the "used-in" list) before commiting the file into the repository:

clojure -Adev locales.clj collect src/uxbox/main/ resources/locales.json

NOTE: Later, we will need to think and implement the way to export and import to other formats (mainly for transifex and similar services compatibility).

How to use it

You have two aproaches for translate strings: one for general purpose and other specific for React components (that leverages reactivity for language changes).

The uxbox.util.i18n/tr is the general purpose function. This is a simple use case example:

(require '[uxbox.util.i18n :refer [tr])

(tr "auth.email-or-username")
;; => "Email or Username"

If you have defined plurals for some translation resource, then you need to pass an additional parameter marked as counter in order to allow the system know when to show the plural:

(require '[uxbox.util.i18n :as i18n :refer [tr]])

(tr "ds.num-projects" (i18n/c 10))
;; => "10 projects"

(tr "ds.num-projects" (i18n/c 1))
;; => "1 project"

For React components, you have uxbox.util.i18n/use-locale hook and the uxbox.util.i18n/t function:

(require '[uxbox.util.i18n :as i18n :refer [t]])

(mf/defc my-component
  [props]
  (let [locale (i18n/use-locale)]
    [:div
     [:span (t locale "auth.email-or-username")]]))

You can use the general purpose function in React component but when language is changed the component will not be rerendered automatically.

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