Question

I’m trying to create a simple theme (using Chameleon and some custom css and images, etc), which I’ve done.

The problem is I want to wrap it up in a maven project and reference from other Vaadin projects as a dependency, so I can theme all my Vaadin apps the same way – or even better have it as a dependency of the parent project so that the whole app gets styled the same way and I can re-skin it for different customers.

I’m not sure how to package and deploy the theme project so that it will be usable from the other projects? Should I make it into a war project – but then how do the other projects ‘get at it’? They’ll be looking for the themes under their own VAADIN/themes directories – rather than copying it there (somehow), how could I just have them reference one single copy?

Answer 1

I’ve had the same problem. I solved it by using war overlays.

I have a base theme in the parent project which is extended in clients’ configuration projects. The configuration project simply uses the war as a runtime dependency and the parent project’s files are overlaid, as explained here.

Just add the dependency in the client’s project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mygroup</groupId>
    <artifactId>my-parent-project</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <type>war</type>
    <scope>runtime</scope>
</dependency>

and import the parent project’s styles in the client’s theme’s styles.css file:

@import "../parent-theme/styles.css"

and add the client’s styles.

If you need to use the classes of the parent project, you can set the attachClasses property true in the maven-war-plugin configuration and also attach the sources by using maven-source-plugin if you need them for debugging:

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.1</version>
    <configuration>
        <attachClasses>true</attachClasses>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-source-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>2.1.2</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <id>attach-sources</id>
            <goals>
                <goal>jar</goal>
            </goals>
        </execution>
    </executions>
    <configuration>
        <attach>true</attach>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

and include them in your client’s project:

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mygroup</groupId>
    <artifactId>my-parent-project</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
    <classifier>classes</classifier>
    <type>jar</type>
    <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>