When i change the subdirectories of my CSS theme, the change can’t be seen in the resulting styles.css and therefor the change doesn’t occur on my webapp. But if i make the change directly to the styles.css folder then change shows up on the webapp and everything is fine. I was wondering if anyone can tell me why this occurs and how to change the subdirectory so that the changes get applied into styles.css.
If I am understanding the issue, you might want to try using a ?restartApplication. I had a similar problem before I ran into my current one!
Hope that helps.
One possible culprit: If you are using Google Chrome, it often caches CSS much more aggressively than what the server tells it to do. Try a few forced refreshes (Shiftl-F5 or Ctrl-F5) to try to make it reload CSS.
It’s not the caching of the browser, because I can change the subdirectory, i.e. the folder corresponding the button.css, and after I save that change; I can open up the styles.css that all the subfolders get compiled into by Vaadin and the change won’t be there. Is there a way to have Vaadin recompile the css?
Sorry for the late reply.
In Vaadin 6, both the compiled theme (styles.css) and the files used to generate it are included in the JAR for the standard themes, the latter mostly for making it easier to see how Vaadin themes are constructed and to find relevant sections to be able to learn from them. The scripts for recompiling the standard themes aren’t there, though, and perhaps not the theme compiler classes and the customized sprite library either. They can be found in the SVN repository, but are not meant to be used by application developers.
In general, you should not modify the standard themes at all but use your own theme that overrides the relevant rules and only those. When your own theme imports e.g. reindeer, it gets the pre-optimized version. Modifying the standard themes very easily leads to a situation where your themes are hard to maintain and you lose the ability to upgrade Vaadin with reasonable effort.