e(fx)clipse 1.1 – New features – CSS-Editor improvements

Having a clever CSS-Editor at hand is crucial when developing JavaFX applications so we once more worked a bit in this central utility for e(fx)clipse 1.1

CSS-Editor improvements

Support for @font-face

The 1.0 CSS-Editor completely freaked out if you tried to add an @font-face definition to load external fonts with the help of your stylesheet. We have not only fixed the problem but also added

autocomplete
simply validation rules

Support for predefined color properties

JavaFX CSS has a very special feature allowing you to define color property-variables which you can reference in an other property's value so you frequently see something like this:

.root {
  -fx-base: black;
}

.myrule {
  -fx-background-color: derive(-fx-base, 50%);
}

The CSS-Editor in 1.0 croaked on the -fx-base definition because -fx-base is not a property on any node. In 1.1 the editor is smart enough to understand that -fx-base, -fx-control-inner-background, ... and many more a color-property-variables and will not mark them as invalid. warning-base

Selectively suppress warnings

The CSS-Editor is smart and if it detects that a scenegraph element hasn't got the property you are using it issues a warning which generally is good because e.g. you might have a spelling error e.g. you wrote -fx-background-colour (british english) instead of -fx-background-color (american english). Yet there are situations where you want to suppress a warning because you know better than the CSS-Editor. The most important ones are:

You define custom color property variables
You use an external library who defines custom css properties but does not provide a cssext-File to help the e(fx)clipse CSS editor

In 1.1 we allow you to suppress those warnings selectively by simply adding @SuppressWarning in a comment above the property like this:

.root {
 /* SuppressWarning */
 -efx-color-constant: #ff0000;
}

warning-suppress

Do not validate all css-Files

In 1.0 the CSS-Editor has been too greedy validating all CSS-Files in your project e.g. if you had a CSS-File in your project to style a HTML-page it got validated and naturally showed a vast number of problems. In 1.1 we only validate files part of the build path of your project and leave out all others.

Co-Existence with WST-CSS-Editor

We improved the co-existence in cases when the WST-CSS-Editor has been installed as well. In 1.0 if both had been installed CSS-Files have been opened by default ALWAYS with the WST-Editor. In 1.1 we added a ITextContentDescriber which detects if the CSS-File:

Holds a header which holds the term JavaFX CSS
Any of the properties in the first 20 lines starts with -fx

and then opens in the e(fx)clipse CSS-Editor