What does currentDesign.writeCssincludes include?

Question

I am trying to find out what exactly css is enabled by the standard call currentDesign.writeCssIncludes(pagecontext); found in headlibs.jsp. The documentation states that this

 Convenience method that writes the CSS include strings to the response. 

Looking at what it does, it will include /etc/designs/currentdesign.css , which is built from css design components and /etc/designs/currentdesign/static.css , which is just a static file. But will it be all that will be?

In particular, what I would like to do is include a clientLib processed css file as part of my design. One way to do this is to manually create css:

 <link rel="stylesheet" href="<%= currentDesign.getPath() %>/myclientlib.css" /> 

But I would prefer it to be created automatically, so my designers have the flexibility to structure css files differently for different projects (i.e. for a “basic” design, they are only good with the static.css file but for the “fancy” one design they want to use LESS css and split files in more detail). And it would be useful to put design-specific css information with the components that they affect, and then separate them.

Answer 1

You can use the <cq:includeClientLib> in combination with themes and / or categories to mix and match CSS bits.

But you may find that this is somewhat limiting; for example, you cannot specify a media attribute. If you need to do this, or your designers do not structure their CSS in a way that suits the theme / category model, your reserve is the method that you defined in your question using <link> directly.

Update

Great question about topics! I just saw how they were used along the way.

You can define a theme by simply adding a new folder / node under /etc/designs/yourproject/clientlibs/themes , as a brother to default .

You can pull out client sheets for a topic with the <cq:includeClientLibs> , possibly under the control of some conditional logic. For example, in one of my projects, I have a topic called authoring that I want to apply only to the author’s instance; I embed it with this code in headlibs.jsp :

 <c:if test="${ (global['wcmmode'] eq 'EDIT') || (global['wcmmode'] eq 'PREVIEW') }"> <cq:includeClientLib theme="apps.myproject.authoring" /> </c:if> 

I have not seen any documentation that would automatically apply a theme to a separate subtree of the content tree or based on the presence of a tag.

There is such a critical operator: "The topic name is retrieved from the request." in Adobe docs backed up by this statement in Sling docs , ThemeResolverFilter provides a subject for the request. The theme is provided as a request attribute. "Therefore, perhaps binding &theme=apps.yourproject.foo to the query string would apply this theme.

Answer 2

The list of CSS files is based on the cq: designPath property of the page.