2. PHPRunner General questions
  3. Upgrading to version 10
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Upgrading to version 10

 		12/26/2018 1:05:16 PM
PHPRunner General questions
T
 thamestrader author

Having looked at and decided against moving from v9.61 to v9.8 because it seemed like it would require the recreation of every List, Add, View and Print page in my application. This seemed like a lot of work - I have around 120 different pages in total, around 30 of these are customised layouts. I have been reviewing the latest v10 evaluation system. The addition of Page Designer is great so I am again looking at whether it is worthwhile biting the bullet and investing the time and effort to rebuild all the custom pages in my application using Bootstrap or if in fact that this will be a step too far, because:

  1. I have no knowledge of what Bootstrap is or how to use it.
  2. I have a very limited and simplistic knowledge of CSS and certainly no idea how to integrate Custom CSS into PHPRunners Page Designer.
  3. All my pages are branded using a restricted and coordinated palette of colours. This was easy to set up using the Style Editor to create a custom style, I've no idea what the equivalent feature is with Bootstrap..
  4. I have one Print page which has to be printed on a single sheet of A4 paper in Portrait mode. This took a lot of time to create in v9.6 as position and size of every item had to be precisely controlled, well as precisely as HTML allows at least.
  5. I am wondering if I need to create my own bespoke Bootstrap.
    Any advices or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
T
 		thamestrader author 12/28/2018

I think I have worked out a conversion method or process, this is a work in progress so I may well update it as my process evolves. For those of you who are native, HTML, CSS and JavaScript authors this will no doubt be second nature but for anyone like myself who has always worked totally within the PHPRunner generator without getting under the hood so to speak, this is all new.
Spent some time studying CSS especially the format of selectors and selector combinations. Then using Developer tools in either Edge or Chrome (although I generally use Edge, Chrome's tools seem easier to use) its possible to determine which style ids (classes) are affecting each specific element of the page. In the Developer tools tell you which CSS file the style is coming from, within the Developer window its possible to modify the style attribute to confirm it is the correct one!. When the correct CSS style item has been identified then it can be added to the custom CSS via Editor.
As far as I can tell there is one Custom CSS file that is applied to all pages - which means for my purpose of applying branding colours once I have one page done then the CSS will be applied to all the other pages during a BUILD. I'm hoping that after a few pages all the styles will have been found and the custom CSS created.
HJB 12/28/2018

The Xlinesoft Team had reasons to spend roughly 18 months development to what is seen by PHPRUNNER 10 as it is right now, with main focus to let the new product truly reflect respectively underline the company slogan "We make Web easier" and get rid of HTML, all under BOOTSTRAP (= optimal display on all gadgets, whether big or small) with a more modern optical shape, so, at least me cannot really see your problem at all, in contrary, it became that easy under PAGE DESIGNER plus the tons of new features and those still to come that indeed you should make a copy of database to do a test run under e.g. XAMPP server to see on how far the specials in your project are automatically "absorbed" successfully, and to see then, what's missing (if any) to be manually fixed. Compares some here as if you own an old Mercedes-Benz car with someone telling you about the MAYBACH car feeling, in short, unless you took a ride at 240 km/h on the highway, you won't believe how comfortable and as well silent it really is ..., so good luck on your testing.
Sergey Kornilov admin 12/28/2018

Knowing a bit of CSS was and is beneficial in all version of PHPRunner. Even when we had Style Editor there were things that you could not change there and Custom CSS is the way to go. After all what you need to do is to figure out ID or CLASS of an element and apply corresponding CSS to it. Browser developer tools prove to be extremely useful.
This article provides some examples that can help you get started. Also in version 10 you can add CSS to individual elements without even knowing its ID or CLASS or selector.
That being said - you don't really need to know much about Bootstrap. CSS works the same way everywhere.