Theme your components

As soon as you start using the imported Starter components, you'll notice that you can switch the client context to apply different themes:

Client contexts

The client contexts are defined in the presets folder of your repository in a file called client-contexts.cc.yml (opens in a new tab). You can define as many client contexts as you like in here, and they will appear in the View as dropdown in your workspace (see animation above).

This example (opens in a new tab) only contains a simple theme key:

- name: Example
  clientContext:
    theme: 'example'

but you can provide whatever context you like, e.g:

- name: Summer
  clientContext:
    colors: ['#555d8e','#566f94','#56819b'],
    font: 'Noto Serif',
    borderRadius: 10

And when embedding your Embeddable in your application, you can pass in the client context dynamically based on the user (i.e. you are not limited to the client contexts you have defined above):

<em-beddable
  token="${json.token}"
  client-context="${JSON.stringify({ 
  	colors: ['#555d8e','#566f94','#56819b'],
    font: 'Noto Serif',
    borderRadius: 10
  })}"
></em-beddable>

This means you can even customise the client context dynamically to every user.

But the client context by itself does nothing. You need to use it inside what's called a themeProvider.

Theme provider

The client contexts are automatically made available inside the embeddable.theme.ts (opens in a new tab) file inside your repository. This is called the themeProvider.

The themeProvider has one job: it takes the client context passed to it and makes a decision what values it should apply to the theme. This theme is then used inside all the components to decide their appearance and behaviour.

A simple example, which would work with our "Summer" client context example (from above) could look something like this:

import { defineTheme } from '@embeddable.com/core';
import { Theme } from '@embeddable.com/vanilla-components';
 
const themeProvider = (clientContext: any, parentTheme: Theme): Theme => {
  
  return defineTheme(parentTheme, {
    charts: {
      colors: clientContext.colors,
    },
    container: {
      borderRadius: clientContext.borderRadius
    },
    font: {
      family: clientContext.font,
    },
  }) as Theme;
};
 
export default themeProvider;

This allows you to set the colors, border radius and font family directly from the client context.

Or if you don't want the theme to be dynamic, but you just want to update it to match your web application's look and feel, you can just define the theme values directly like this (ignoring client context):

import { defineTheme } from '@embeddable.com/core';
import { Theme } from '@embeddable.com/vanilla-components';
 
const themeProvider = (clientContext: any, parentTheme: Theme): Theme => {
  
  return defineTheme(parentTheme, {
    charts: {
      colors: ['#555d8e','#566f94','#56819b'],
    },
    container: {
      borderRadius: 10
    },
    font: {
      family: 'Noto Serif',
    },
  }) as Theme;
};
 
export default themeProvider;

For an in-depth look at themes click here.

Next steps