CSS helper classes

Rather than creating a new skin format, apply standard, predefined Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) helper classes to make a minor formatting change to a cell or dynamic layout. Using CSS helper classes saves development time, reduces maintenance by limiting the number of customized skin formats, and improves the consistency of the look and feel of your application. By avoiding the introduction of unnecessary static content, you also improve the initial loading time of your application.

If your application has many formats of the same type, such as inline or stacked formats, and these formats vary only slightly, you might benefit from using CSS helper classes. For example, you might use one of the following helper classes instead of creating a new skin format:

• The center helper class centers an element in its layout.
• The margin-r-2x helper class applies twice the standard margin to the right side of an item.

Skin inheritance

To use the CSS helper classes, make sure that your application skin inherits from the pyEndUser skin in the UIKit rule. For more information, see UI Kit. Alternatively, you can add the CSS file py-common-helper-classes.css to your application skin on the Included styles tab of the Skin form.

Standard CSS helper classes

Categorized by layout and cell, standard CSS helper classes make the following types of adjustments possible:

• Center elements horizontally and vertically
• Increase or decrease standard margins and padding
• Set a minimum or maximum height
• Set width or height as a percentage, or make it automatically adjusting
• Apply borders of different widths
• Format text
• Make the cursor an arrow or a pointer
• Specify visibility options (hidden or disabled)
• Set Flexbox layouts