Vaadin 7.3 + Font Awesome + Windows Policies

Vaadin 6 / 7 / 8
1

Hi all,

This is just a note for the Vaadin Team about, I think, a “core design” implementation.

We have a big customer that is using internet explorer as the only allowed browser in its facilities.
This customer has high security requirements on its network and it has lots of policies applied to all of its systems.

We developed a bunch of applications where we used FontAwesome with the result that using their browser (IE11) no icon were shown.

All custom fonts (and also FontAwesome) were blocked by one of their policies, so that we needed to replace all Font icons with standard images.

This article (
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457144.aspx
 ) contains information about this policy.

Then, I had to switch to vaadin 7.3.8 to overcome some issues we had with an older version of Vaadin-CDI and I realized that now Vaadin core components are using FontAwesome per default (for instance the ComboBox and also the FormLayout).

This would make using plain Vaadin components much harder for us, for instance with this customer.

Would it be better, or not, to avoid using this kind of icons in vaadin core components (I mean, of course, not only for us) or at least give somehow the possibility to the developer to choose between using or not FontAwesome?

Thanks for your attention
Guglielmo Moretti

2

Hi Guglielmo,

would be interesting for me as well, because FontAwesome doesn’t work for me in IE10 on Internet resources (e.g. Valo Demo) but works for e.g. intranet sites.

Are there workarounds known?

3

Because of I needed a really quick solution, I ended up writing custom css that gets injected when we are under IE.
This css replaces FontIcons with unicode HTML chars.

The only really bad one is the icon of the datepicker. There are no “calendar” icons on the unicode charlist ;). By the way, the final result is pretty good.

I’m not a css wiz like jouni but it worked

Here the gist you need, if you want


https://gist.github.com/guglielmomoretti/214bd10a226b62edf865

Regards
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