Style Guide

The style guide defines a set of guidelines that the design follows to maintain a consistent look and feel. It is defined to be flexible, easy to update and consistent. Before delving deeper into the UI or developing additional features we recommend familiarizing yourself with some of the items.

Prerequisites

For admin interface development, it may come handy to run npm or grunt from the command line. For that, you can either install those tools globally on your machine, or use the versions Opencast installs locally when building via Maven. If you want to do that, you may want to add the installation folders to your path variable:

cd modules/admin-ui-frontend
export PATH=node:node_modules/.bin:$PATH

Debugging Javascript unit tests

Our Javascript unit tests are built in Jasmine (a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript code), and live in modules/admin-ui-frontend/test/test/unit.

Occasionally something breaks, or you need to disable or focus on a single test. While reading the Jasmine, Karma and Grunt docs are encouraged, here are a few common recipes that might be useful:

Disabling a unit test temporarily

Add x to the broken test. For example:

Before	After
it('runs a test', function () {	xit('runs a test', function () {

Running a single unit test

Add f (for focus) to the relevant test. For example:

Before	After
it('runs a test', function () {	fit('runs a test', function () {

Triggering a browser debugging session

This triggers an instance of the selected browser(s) to open and begin running the tests. There will be a Debug button which will open another tab where the JavaScript has not been minified, use this second tab for debugging. Refreshing the debugging page will rerun the tests.

To run Karma

• Chrome npm run test-chrome

• Firefox npm run test-firefox

• IE npm run test-ie

Additional browsers are supported, the full list can be found at https://karma-runner.github.io/.

Live working with a running Opencast

In order to speed up the UI development process, you can test the code without building the module with Maven. There is a Grunt task for starting a standalone web server offering the UI from the source and a separate task that will monitoring any change to the Sass, JavaScript and HTML files and reload the page dynamically.

Be warned that some functionality in this live setup can be limited. Before reporting an issue, please test if you can reproduced the issue with a built Opencast.

This setup may be configured as follows:

1. Follow the instructions in the Prerequisites section.

2. Start your Opencast instance.

3. Change to the Admin UI module directory.

   cd modules/admin-ui-frontend
   

4. Install project dependencies.

   npm install && bower install
   

5. Start the standalone web server by running:

   grunt proxy --proxy.host=http://localhost:8080 --proxy.username=opencast_system_account --proxy.password=CHANGE_ME
   

Note: host, username and password have to match your configuration ../etc/custom.properties

Grunt should print out the URL where you can see the standalone page running from source.

Started connect web server on http://localhost:9000

To run the watcher that updates the displayed page dynamically, run in the same folder:

grunt watch

Which should then display:

Running "watch" task
Waiting...

The watch process monitors the js,scss and sass files for changes and should dynamically reload the page.

Note: A refresh of the page might be required to start the live reload script

Live working with a Mockup

If you do not want to keep a running Opencast instance for developing the Admin UI NG, you can start a mockup.

Be warned that a lot of this mockup's functionality acts very differently from an actual Opencast instance

This setup may be configured as follows:

1. Follow the instructions in the Prerequisites section.

2. Change to the Admin UI module directory.

   cd modules/admin-ui-frontend
   

3. Install project dependencies.

   npm install && bower install
   

4. Start the mockup webserver by running:

   grunt serve
   

Grunt should print out the URL where you can see the standalone page running from source.

Started connect web server on http://localhost:9000

If you make changes to the Admin UI NG source files, the page should auto reload to display the changes.

Update Node Dependencies

Installing npm-check-updates and running it at the start of developing / improving a component can ensure that the node modules stays up-to-date and dependency bugs are reduced.

Note: Test the build (mvn install, npm install, grunt) thoroughly when upgrading modules as this might cause some unexpected build failures (resetting the grunt version to "grunt": "^0.4.0" might resolve some of the initial issues).

1. Installation.

   npm install -g npm-check-updates
   

2. Show any new dependencies for the project in the current directory.

   ncu
   

3. Upgrade a project's package file.

   ncu -u
   

A detailed reference of the command-line tool can be found at https://www.npmjs.com/package/npm-check-updates.