Customizing the Look and Feel

Introduction

Mobiscroll components are shipped with a ready-to-use, carefully crafted design, with the ability to adapt to the platform where they are being used. The available themes are:

• ios and ios-dark - theme matching the iOS platform look & feel
• material and material-dark - theme matching the Material Design specification
• windows and windows-dark - theme matching the Universal Windows platform look & feel

The Mobiscroll package is shipped with a pre-built css file, once it's added to your project, the bundled themes can be used right away. The packages also contain scss files, for theme customizations and tree shaking solutions.

While the provided pre-built themes are enough in many use cases, most of the times on top of adapting to a specific platform, you'd also like to match a brand or color scheme. Mobiscroll provides various ways to achieve this:

• Override the Sass color variables - the straightforward way to change the colors in one place throughout the application.
• Create custom themes using Sass - use this, if you need multiple themes with different color variatons, in case you have pages with different colors, or you'd like to users to customize the colors of your app.
• Create custom themes using the theme builder - the custom themes can be also built using out theme builder, on a graphical user interface, without any coding, or the need for Sass support in your project.

To work with the first two methods, you need to have Sass support configured for your project. Ionic apps are pre-configured to work with Sass, apps created with the Angular CLI Sass support can be choosen when creating a new app (ng new my-app --style=scss), or can be added for existing projects as well.

If you're not using the tools above, you can use any existing Sass tooling to compile the scss file into css (such as gulp-sass or grunt-sass). The simplest approach is to use the node-sass CLI - you simply run:

$ node-sass src/my-theme.scss dist/my-theme.css

Once Sass support is set up, instead of the pre-built css file, you need to import the provided scss file.
If using the mobiscroll npm package:

@import "~@mobiscroll/angular/dist/css/mobiscroll.scss"

Otherwise:

@import "./path/to/mobiscroll/css/mobiscroll.scss"

Add this import to the appropriate file:

• styles.scss in case of an Angular CLI app.
• variables.scss in case of Ionic 3.
• global.scss in case of Ionic 4.

You can also use the Mobiscroll CLI to import the scss file into your project automatically:

$ mobiscroll config angular --scss

Tree Shaking for styles

Tree shaking is a term commonly used in web development and particularly in JavaScript for unused code removal. Since websites are served (mostly) over the network, loading times depend on content size, so minification and unused content elimination plays a major role in making webapps fluid.

For the JavaScript part, popular frameworks already have the treeshaking built in, so the components that are not used will be left out from the built project.

Eliminating unused styles

In case of the styles, leaving out the unused rules is not as straight forward.
The overarching idea is that CSS selectors match elements in the DOM, and those elements in the DOM come from all sorts of places: your static templates, dynamic templates based on server-side state, and of course, JavaScript, which can manipulate the DOM in any way at all, including pull things from APIs and third parties.

Sass variables to the rescue

The Mobiscroll Library comes with a modular SASS bundle, that can be configured which component styles and which themes to leave in and out for the compiled css file.

Every component and theme has a SASS variable that can be turned on or off. If the variable is falsy the styles that it needs will not be added to the bundle.

// include the ios theme
$mbsc-ios-theme: true;

// include the components:
$mbsc-datepicker: true;
$mbsc-eventcalendar: true;
        
@import "@mobiscroll/angular/dist/css/mobiscroll.modular.scss"

In the above example the styles needed for the eventcalendar and datepicker will be included and only for the ios theme. All other components (like select or grid-layout) and all other themes will be left out from the bundle.

Here's the complete list of the components and themes that can be used:

• $mbsc-datepicker
• $mbsc-eventcalendar
• $mbsc-forms
• $mbsc-grid-layout
• $mbsc-popup
• $mbsc-select

• $mbsc-ios-theme
• $mbsc-material-theme
• $mbsc-windows-theme

Override the Sass Color Variables

A convenient way to customize the colors of the Mobiscroll components is to override the Sass color variables.

Let's say your branding uses a nice red accent color, and you'd like that color to appear on the Mobiscroll components as well, while still using platform specific themes (e.g. ios on iOS devices, material on Android devices, and mobiscroll on desktop). You can override the accent color for every theme:

$mbsc-ios-accent: #e61d2a;
$mbsc-material-accent: #e61d2a;
$mbsc-mobiscroll-accent: #e61d2a;

@import "~@mobiscroll/angular/dist/css/mobiscroll.angular.scss"

Of course you can customize more than just the accent, like background, text, primary, secondary colors, etc. Here's the complete list of the Sass variables being used:

iOS Theme

Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-ios-accent	#007bff	Accent color
$mbsc-ios-background	#f7f7f7	Background color
$mbsc-ios-text	#000000	Text color
$mbsc-ios-dark-accent	#ff8400	Accent color for dark version
$mbsc-ios-dark-background	#000000	Background color for dark version
$mbsc-ios-dark-text	#ffffff	Text color for dark version
Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-ios-primary	#3f97f6	Primary color
$mbsc-ios-secondary	#90979E	Secondary color
$mbsc-ios-success	#43BE5F	Success color
$mbsc-ios-danger	#f5504e	Danger color
$mbsc-ios-warning	#f8b042	Warning color
$mbsc-ios-info	#5BB7C5	Info color
$mbsc-ios-light	#ffffff	Light color
$mbsc-ios-dark	#47494A	Dark color

Material Theme

Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-material-accent	#009688	Accent color
$mbsc-material-background	#eeeeee	Background color
$mbsc-material-text	#5b5b5b	Text color
$mbsc-material-dark-accent	#81ccc4	Accent color for dark version
$mbsc-material-dark-background	#303030	Background color for dark version
$mbsc-material-dark-text	#c2c2c2	Text color for dark version
Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-material-primary	#3f97f6	Primary color
$mbsc-material-secondary	#90979E	Secondary color
$mbsc-material-success	#43BE5F	Success color
$mbsc-material-danger	#f5504e	Danger color
$mbsc-material-warning	#f8b042	Warning color
$mbsc-material-info	#5BB7C5	Info color
$mbsc-material-light	#ffffff	Light color
$mbsc-material-dark	#47494A	Dark color

Mobiscroll Theme

Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-mobiscroll-accent	#4eccc4	Accent color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-background	#f7f7f7	Background color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-text	#454545	Text color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-dark-accent	#4fccc4	Accent color for dark version
$mbsc-mobiscroll-dark-background	#263238	Background color for dark version
$mbsc-mobiscroll-dark-text	#f7f7f7	Text color for dark version
Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-mobiscroll-primary	#3f97f6	Primary color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-secondary	#90979E	Secondary color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-success	#43BE5F	Success color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-danger	#f5504e	Danger color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-warning	#f8b042	Warning color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-info	#5BB7C5	Info color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-light	#ffffff	Light color
$mbsc-mobiscroll-dark	#47494A	Dark color

Windows Theme

Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-windows-accent	#0078d7	Accent color
$mbsc-windows-background	#f2f2f2	Background color
$mbsc-windows-text	#262626	Text color
$mbsc-windows-dark-accent	#0078d7	Accent color for dark version
$mbsc-windows-dark-background	#1a1a1a	Background color for dark version
$mbsc-windows-dark-text	#ffffff	Text color for dark version
Variable name	Default value	Description
$mbsc-windows-primary	#3f97f6	Primary color
$mbsc-windows-secondary	#90979E	Secondary color
$mbsc-windows-success	#43BE5F	Success color
$mbsc-windows-danger	#f5504e	Danger color
$mbsc-windows-warning	#f8b042	Warning color
$mbsc-windows-info	#5BB7C5	Info color
$mbsc-windows-light	#ffffff	Light color
$mbsc-windows-dark	#47494A	Dark color

Create Custom Themes Using Sass

If you'd like to use multiple color variations for the Mobiscroll components, the solution is to create one or more custom themes. A custom theme is a variation of one of the built in themes, referred as the base theme.

To create a custom theme using Sass, you can use the provided mbsc-custom-theme function, which can be called after the mobiscroll scss file has been imported:

@import "~@mobiscroll/angular/dist/css/mobiscroll.scss"
$colors-ios-custom: (
    button: #6D8764,
    accent: #6D8764,
    background: #F7F7F7,
    text: #000000
);
@include mbsc-custom-theme('ios-custom', 'ios', $colors-ios-custom);

Function name	Description
mbsc-custom-theme($theme-name, $base-theme-name, $colors)	A function which creates the styling for a custom theme, with the specified colors Parameters $theme-name - String - Name of the custom theme. $base-theme-name - String - Name of the base theme. Possible values: 'ios', 'material', 'mobiscroll', 'windows'. $colors - Map - A key-value map containing the input colors. Possible keys: 'background', 'text', 'accent', 'button' (for iOS base theme only).

Before you can use the custom theme, you will also need to register it in your javascript / typescript code. This can be done inside the module file, where MbscModule is loaded. Make sure to use the same name which was specified to the Sass function, and specify the same base theme as second parameter.

import { MbscModule, createCustomTheme } from '@mobiscroll/angular';

createCustomTheme('ios-custom', 'ios');

You can now specify the newly created theme to any Mobiscroll component using the theme setting:

<mbsc-eventcalendar theme="mobiscroll-red"></mbsc-eventcalendar>

Create Custom Themes Using the Theme Builder

If Sass support is not available in your project, or you prefer a visual theme editor, you can use our theme builder to create custom themes.

The theme builder is very easy to use, no coding is needed, you just choose the colors, and save the custom theme. Using our download builder you can select one or more custom themes to include in the package.

You can find more information on the theme builder features and usage here.

Custom Themes with Light and Dark variants

To use custom themes together with the themeVariant option (which controls whether the light or dark variant of a theme will be used), make sure to create two custom themes, where the dark version has the same name as the light one, suffixed with '-dark', e.g.: 'my-theme' and 'my-theme-dark'.

How to use custom themes with NPM packagess

Starting from version 4.7.0 the NPM packages are shipped with SCSS mixins which makes it possible to create custom themes programmatically. To create a custom theme, make sure to load the SCSS file from the NPM package. After that you can create a custom theme like this:

@include mbsc-custom-theme('ios-custom', 'ios', ('button': #6D8764, 'background': #f7f7f7, 'text': #000000, 'accent': #6D8764));

Custom themes needs to be registered in the javascript / typescript code as well, once the Mobiscroll modules are loaded:

import { createCustomTheme } from '@mobiscroll/angular';

createCustomTheme('ios-custom', 'ios');