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| +# Views Platform Styling |
| + |
| +## Overview |
| + |
| +Views controls may have different appearances on different platforms, so that |
| +Views UIs can fit better into the platform's native styling. This document |
| +describes how to build Views UIs that will look good on all platforms with a |
| +minimum of manual intervention. |
| + |
| +UIs looking good happens at two levels: first, the individual controls must look |
| +and act appropriately for their platform, and second, the overall layout of the |
| +controls in a dialog or UI surface must match what users of the platform would |
| +expect. There are differences at both of these layers between desktop platforms, |
| +and mobile platforms have still more differences. |
| + |
| +## Controls |
| + |
| +Individual controls have different looks and behaviors on different platforms. |
| +If you're adding a new control or a subclass of an existing control, there are |
| +some best practices you should follow in designing it so that it works well |
| +everywhere: |
| + |
| +### Use PlatformStyle for stylistic elements |
| + |
| +PlatformStyle exposes factory functions that produce different subclasses of |
| +Border, Background, and so on that are appropriate to the current platform. If |
| +your class needs a special kind of border or another stylistic element, creating |
| +it through a factory function in PlatformStyle will make per-platform styling |
| +for it easier, and will make which parts of the appearance are platform-specific |
| +more apparent. For example, if you were adding a Foo control that had a special |
| +FooBackground background, you might add a function to PlatformStyle: |
| + |
| + unique_ptr<FooBackground> CreateFooBackground(); |
| + |
| +and a default implementation in PlatformStyle. This way, in future a |
| +platform-specific implementation can go in PlatformStyleBar and change the |
| +background of that control on platform Bar without changing the implementation |
| +of the Foo control at all. |
| + |
| +### Use PlatformStyle to add simple behavior switches |
| + |
| +When adding platform-specific behavior for an existing control, if possible, it |
| +is useful to implement the switch using a const boolean exported from |
| +PlatformStyle, instead of ifdefs inside the control's implementation. For |
| +example, instead of: |
| + |
| + #if defined(OS_BAR) |
| + void Foo::DoThing() { ... } |
| + #else |
| + void Foo::DoThing() { ... } |
| + #endif |
| + |
| +It's better to do this: |
| + |
| + Foo::Foo() : does_thing_that_way_(PlatformStyle::kFooDoesThingThatWay) |
| + |
| + void Foo::DoThing() { |
| + if (does_thing_that_way_) |
| + ... |
| + else |
| + ... |
| + } |
| + |
| +This pattern makes it possible to unit-test all the different platform behaviors |
| +on one platform. |
| + |
| +### Use subclassing to add complex behavior switches |
|
sky
2016/05/05 23:27:43
Do you have an example of this? I could see this f
Elly Fong-Jones
2016/05/06 19:23:29
Done.
|
| + |
| +If a lot of the behavior of Foo needs to change per-platform, creating |
| +platform-specific subclasses of Foo and a factory method on Foo that creates the |
| +appropriate subclass for the platform is easier to read and understand than |
| +having ifdefs or lots of control flow inside Foo to implement per-platform |
| +behavior. |
| + |
| +## UI Layout / Controls |
| + |
| +TODO(ellyjones): This section needs a bit more thought. |
| + |
| +Some platforms have conventions about the ordering of buttons in dialogs, or the |
| +presence or absence of certain common controls. For example, on Mac, dialogs are |
| +expected to have their "default" button at the bottom right, and expected not to |
| +have a "close" button in their top corner if they have a "Cancel"/"Dismiss" |
| +button in the dialog body. If you can design a layout that follows all |
| +platforms' conventions simultaneously, that is the lowest-effort route to |
| +follow, but if not, there are static booleans in PlatformStyle that hold the |
| +appropriate values for these decisions on the current platform, like: |
| + |
| + static const bool PlatformStyle::kDialogsShouldHaveCloseButton; |
| + |
| +You can then condition your dialog creation code like this: |
| + |
| + if (PlatformStyle::kDialogsShouldHaveCloseButton) |
| + views::Button* close_button = ...; |
| + |
| +TODO(ellyjones): Actually add these variables to PlatformStyle |