Theme Designer v2 Architecture

Owned by Danny Gibas
Last updated: Aug 18, 2023
3 min read

This document aims to document the high level architecture for Theme Designer v2 (TDv2) as discovery occurs.

Decision points

1. Should the application be built in NOP or as a stand alone application?

Decision Made?
What was the decision?

The application will be built standalone, likely with Nuxt but the script for the application will be referenced from within a NOP plugin. This will allow us to insert the TDv2 user interface into a live Commerce store.

The TDv2 script will be stored in a central location that can be accessed by any commerce store.

Benefits to this approach:

  • Theme Designer code updates can occur without a dependency on consumer application release cycles

  • TDv2 can be migrated to use on any front end in our application suite without significant refactoring to separate it from Commerce

  • Does not add additional overhead to the current Commerce build pipeline

  • Changes in the TDv2 application will incur no risk to the host application

Risks and concerns with this approach:

Higher LOE to stand up an application vs building everything in nop could extend timeline to completion

 

2. What UI library should we use the base components?

Decision Made?
Considerations:
Proposals:

  • Vuetify 2

  • Vuetify 3

  • VueMaterial

  • VueTailwind

Who is researching this?

Not yet assigned

3. How will we access the CSS properties on the loaded page?

Decision Made?
What was the decision?

Research was conducted into 3rd party options to do this, as well as using configuration driven page mappings. No 3rd party options were identified that would provide the utility that we needed to access properties in a way that solved our problem. Further, a configuration based approach would make implementation less flexible and incur tech debt as these configs would have to be maintained.

A more flexible approach is one in which the application parses the CSS DOM for implemented CSS custom props and returns an object that can be used to generate the UI controls dynamically. We have proven this approach out in this prototype:

https://bitbucket.org/aspenwareunity/commerce-theme-builder/branch/theme-designer-prototype

In this solution, the CSS DOM is parsed for props the --ads prefix, deconstruct the prop name into a deep nested relational object parent > child > child > ... propType . Arrays of those relational objects are flattened into a single relational object and that object can be used by the view layer to render a dynamic UI. The UI will use a component library that has been modified to match the Aspenware Design System (ADS) requirements

This flexibility has one dependency – following the design token naming structure defined in the Theme Designer Var Document when adding new theme properties:

Creating CSS Properties for Theme Designer V2

Benefits to this approach:

  • Highly flexible – can be applied to any web application that uses --ads custom props

  • Mitigates tech debt by removing the requirement of managing configuration files for CSS property changes

  • Allows us to layer in a UI component library of our choosing for the prop controls

  • No 3rd party library to become competent at to use it properly and effectively

Risks and concerns with this approach:

  • Higher risk of bugs early on to roll our own property management solution since there is a smaller test pool than a published 3rd party solution

  • Ensuring adequate cross platform compatibility as the solution requires the use of some lesser used JS methods and CSS DOM parsing techniques.

  • Malformed props might be introduced into the system by developers (note: we plan to mitigate this with prop validation)

 

4. How will we save, recall, and publish CSS props for resort themes?

Decision Made?
Considerations:

TBD

Proposals:

TBD

Who is researching this?

Jira ticket not yet assigned

5. How will we map the CSS prop names to the component library

Decision Made?
Considerations:

  • Must allow us to map the props to groups

  • Must allow us to use the groups to create collapse points in an accordion

  • Must use a Vue supported Material UI library or let us use a UI library of our own choosing.

  • Must allow us to toggle controls based on dependencies. For example, if the user choses to not show the price on their product cards, we don't want to display the controls for price CSS props.

  • Nice to have: Ability to provide information to the user about the control/option.

Proposals:
Who is researching this?

Danno and Gibas