Salient Soft

This follows on from this earlier post for Angular 6.

PrimeNG has for some time removed support for legacy themeroller themes and added their own architecture and theme editor. However, for the first time, the theme editor and the SCSS theming interface/standard SCSS files are no longer open source, but are a paid for option. The rest of the component set, including the delivered compiled css for all the standard themes, is available as open source as before.

Therefore, having considered the options, I elected to take a standard theme that was close to what I needed and edit its css directly. This is suggested as an option by Prime for small changes, but it is possible that later changes to the theme architecture could require theme changes as we are editing the compiled css. I decided that the risk and rework that might be needed was small, so have taken this route.

My policy on this is to copy the theme files to a new theme folder under assets/resources/themes/, and then to rename the theme.css file to theme.scss, as the compiled css is also valid scss. This then allows me to add my own variables as required for theme colours etc. to avoid duplication. The intention is to minimise alterations to the original theme, so I would only add variables where I had made changes, to minimise any rework if I had to take a new version of the standard theme and add my changes again.

Whilst doing this, I noted a warning that node-sass, as used previously, is now deprecated. I therefore switched to sass, as per this stackoverflow post, using npm uninstall -g node-sass followed by npm install -g sass. This worked fine, and my changes to the existing compilation script in package.json (also allowing multiple themes to be compiled) were as follows:-

 “scripts”: {
“ng”: “ng”,
“start”: “ng serve”,
“build”: “ng build”,
“test”: “ng test”,
“lint”: “ng lint”,
“e2e”: “ng e2e”,
“scss”: “npm run scss1 && npm run scss2”,
“scss1”: “cd src/assets/resources/themes/salient-new && sass theme.scss:theme.css –source-map .”
“scss2”: “cd src/assets/resources/themes/salient-new2 && sass theme.scss:theme.css –source-map .”
},

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In angular 6 I was able to load custom static scripts, either via script tags in index.html, or dynamically, by placing the scripts in the project root (when using ng serve), or in the dist/projectname folder when running the built application. I originally used this for externalised configuration per my original post here, initially using script tags in index.html, and later using dynamic script loading via APP_INITIALIZER, which allowed dynamically named config files derived from query string parameters, and also early dynamic loading of external scripts such as for Yoti.

However, in angular 11, these use cases all gave 404 errors on the script. Posts such as this one here pointed to the need to place static files under the assets/ folder (although the post used an earlier angular version than 6, so I would expect it to work). I tried this, and both the static and dynamic use cases then worked correctly. I suspect that this is due to changes in the packaging when building and using ng serve. I retried a simple new project with a static script called from index.html, both under 6.1.7 and under 11.0.6. Under the older version, scripts in the root folder worked, but under 11.0.6, I had to place the scripts under assets (or in a subfolder of assets). This clearly demonstrated and resolved the problem.

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I needed to upgrade node/angular/PrimeNG/primeNG Showcase to the latest versions (Node 15.5, Angular 11, PrimeNG 11) , but I also wanted to be able to maintain projects on older versions using Angular 6.

This post details how to do this with nvm under Linux, but an alternive nvm implementation is needed for windows. This is detailed here, and the git repo for this version with full instructions is here . I uninstalled the existing angular cli/PrimeNG via npm uninstall, and then removed my node installation via control panel.

Next I installed nvm per the above post for the windows implementation. Per the above post for the Linux version, I used nvm install to install node versions 10.4.0 and 15.5. I then selected each in turn via nvm use, and for each version, I installed the desired angular/cli for that version globally in the standard way, using for example npm install -g @angular/cli@6.2.2 for the legacy version. Note that using -g in this case installs globally for the currently selected node version only, so when you switch/select the current node version with npm use, you also automatically select the angular/cli version that you previously installed with it.

Having done this, and as per the above posts, you must remember to select the desired node version with nvm use in each command window or batch file that you use. The version is not selected for a project directory, but is per command window/process.

I was then able to use both the latest angular/primeNG and the legacy ones, and could build and run with both on the same machine.

One issue I hit with primeNG when performing npm install on the latest version was a bug in the latest version of node: “Cannot destructure property ‘name’ of ‘node’ as it is null.” This bug is detailed here. Per the post comment by Mika Bertels, I reverted to npm 6 using npm i -g npm@6. In my case, npm gave a file already exists error, so as hinted by node I used the –force flag to force the reversion of version. This worked fine, and my npm install of primeng worked successfully

Per the instructions here, the primeng 11 can just be installed and then run with ng serve, and I did not hit any issues with theme building etc. which I did with earlier versions, presumably due to all the themeing changes. Note also that this setup guide for primeng explains how to install primeng and primeicons when using with your own project – I did not need to do this initially as I was just running the showcase.

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