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Custom Applications v21.6

16 May 2022
Feature
DevelopmentConfiguration

The Application Kit packages have been released with a minor version v21.6.

This release includes several new features that we would like to present:

  • A new built-in Stacking Layer System to automatically and consistently calculate z-index values of stacked modal containers.
  • New layout UI components <InfoDetailPage>, <FormDetailPage> and <CustomFormDetailPage>.
  • The CLI commands config:sync now lists changes when updating an existing Custom Application configuration.
  • The Jest preset @commercetools-backend/jest-preset-mc-app contains more Intl polyfills.

As always, if you have questions or feedback you can open a GitHub Discussion or a GitHub Issue.

Introducing the Stacking Layer System.

Background

Components such as modal pages, dialogs, etc. are rendered using a "modal" container. These containers are then rendered within a special container called portals-container.

Up until now, rendering these components required to define things like zIndex or level props, to imperatively determine how the component will be visible. This was required as the modal containers are positioned absolute and finding the correct z-index value is important.

However, it's the responsibility of the developer to "pick" the correct values which is error prone. In fact, choosing a wrong z-index results in the modal to not be visible and thus leading to UI bugs.

A better and more reliable approach would be for the Custom Application to automatically determine the correct z-index values for every modal container rendered on the page.

Stacking Layer System

To solve this issue, a Custom Application now implements a Stacking Layer System to automatically determine and apply the correct z-index values for every modal container.

Therefore, it is not necessary anymore to explicitly provide the zIndex and level props to the modal pages or dialog components. The following props have been deprecated: level and baseZIndex (modal pages).

To remove the deprecated props you can run the codemod remove-deprecated-modal-level-props:

$ npx @commercetools-frontend/codemod remove-deprecated-modal-level-props 'src/**/*.js'

For backwards compatibility, the zIndex prop is still supported and, if defined, it will overwrite the z-index value using !important. Therefore we recommend to only define it if absolutely necessary, otherwise it's safe to remove it.