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2. Building pages

Now that we have a Vue app using the UI Shell, it’s time to build a few static pages. In this step, we’ll become comfortable with the Carbon grid and various Carbon components.

Preview

A preview of what you’ll build:

Fork, clone and branch

This tutorial has an accompanying GitHub repository called carbon-tutorial-vue that we’ll use as a starting point for each step. If you haven’t forked and cloned that repository yet, and haven’t added the upstream remote, go ahead and do so by following the step 1 instructions.

Branch

With your repository all set up, let’s check out the branch for this tutorial step’s starting point.

git fetch upstream
git checkout -b vue-step-2 upstream/vue-step-2

Note: This builds on top of step 1, but be sure to check out the upstream step 2 branch because it includes the static assets and fixes required to get through this step.

Build and start app

Install the app’s dependencies (in case you’re starting fresh in your current directory and not continuing from the previous step):

yarn

Then, start the app:

yarn serve

You should see something similar to where the previous step left off.

Install grid

In our last step we added our styles, component and icon packages. Now that we’re building the pages with grid, we need to install one more Carbon package. Stop your development environment (

CTRL-C
) and:

yarn add @carbon/grid

In 

_carbon.scss
, we need to configure our grid to use 16 columns instead of the default 12 columns. We do this by adding 
grid-columns-16: true
in our 
$feature-flags
.

$feature-flags: (
  grid-columns-16: true
);

Note: Like before, the feature flag still needs to come before the Carbon 

styles.scss
import.

Run 

yarn serve
so we can begin building.

Add landing page grid

Let’s add our grid elements to 

LandingPage.vue
.

In order to use the grid, we need to wrap everything in a 

<div class="cds--grid">
. We can continue to make rows by adding a 
<div class="cds--row">
inside the grid, as well as make columns within those rows by adding 
<div class="cds--col-[breakpoint]-[size]">
.

Our column sizes are specified by the number of columns they’ll be spanning. If we use 

cds--col-lg-4
, it means it’ll span 4 of the 16 columns. If we use 
cds--col-lg-8
it means it’ll span 8 of the 16 columns, and so on.

We’ve included the designs for this tutorial app in the 

design.sketch
file found as a top-level file in the 
carbon-tutorial-vue
repository. But, if you don’t have Sketch installed and available to inspect the design, we’ll provide screenshots.

Landing page grid

Landing page grid

Pro tip: 

CTRL-L
toggles the layout in Sketch.

We’ll break this down into three rows. The first row with the gray background doesn’t appear to need any columns. The second row with the white background looks like it has two columns of different widths. The third row with the gray background looks like it has four columns of equal width.

We’ll make rows like so:

<template>
  <div class="cds--grid cds--grid--full-width landing-page">
    <div class="cds--row landing-page__banner">
      <div class="cds--col-lg-16">1</div>
    </div>
    <div class="cds--row landing-page__r2">
      <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-7">7/16</div>
      <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--offset-lg-1 cds--col-lg-8">8/16</div>
    </div>

We added a class of 

cds--grid--full-width
to the grid container since our rows need to expand the whole page without any margins. We also added some custom classes like 
landing-page
, 
landing-page__banner
, 
landing-page__r2
, etc., which we will use later.

Also, take notice of the second row. The tab content only covers 7 columns at this large viewport to prevent overly-large line lengths, so we needed to add a 1 column offset 

cds--offset-lg-1
to second column to fill the full 16 columns in the grid. Then, both of those columns have 
cds--col-md-4
classes so they are of equal width at medium-sized viewports.

Build landing page

We’ll start adding HTML elements and components by row.

First row

In our first row we’ll use a 

CvBreadcrumb
component.

We can now add our component to the first row, along with a header, like so:

<div class="cds--row landing-page__banner">
  <div class="cds--col-lg-16">
    <cv-breadcrumb noTrailingSlash>
      <cv-breadcrumb-item>
        <cv-link href="/">Getting started</cv-link>
      </cv-breadcrumb-item>
    </cv-breadcrumb>
    <h1 class="landing-page__heading">Design &amp; build with Carbon</h1>
  </div>

You may notice that the styles look off. Don’t worry, we’ll fix these later.

Second row

In our second row we’ll use 

CvTabs
and 
CvButton
components.

Modify the second row to use the 

Tab
component.

<div class="cds--row landing-page__r2">
  <div class="cds--col cds--no-gutter">
    <cv-tabs selected="0">
      <cv-tab label="About">
        <div class="cds--grid cds--grid--no-gutter cds--grid--full-width">
          <div class="cds--row landing-page__tab-content">
            <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-7">7/16</div>
            <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--offset-lg-1 cds--col-lg-8">8/16</div>
          </div>

Note: We’re using the grid for the page layout, but we also need to apply the grid within the tab content. When doing so, make sure the nested grid has the expected 

grid
> 
row
> 
col
DOM structure.

Hold up! If you were to run DAP to check for accessibility violations, you’d see 

Multiple navigation landmarks must have unique labels specified with aria-label or aria-labelledby
because both the 
CvBreadcrumb
and 
CvTabs
components use 
<nav>
elements. To fix, add 
aria-label
to the 
CvBreadcrumb
opening tag:

<cv-breadcrumb noTrailingSlash aria-label="Page navigation">

Same goes for the 

CvTabs
opening tag:

<cv-tabs selected="0" aria-label="Tab navigation">

Give yourself a pat on the back if you actually ran the DAP tool. We’ll install the DAP tool in a later step, so don’t worry if you didn’t.

Next, we’ll need to add a styling override to move the tabs to the right on large viewports. Create a file 

_carbon-overrides.scss
in 
src/views/LandingPage
with this declaration block.

.landing-page__r2 .cds--tabs__nav {
  right: 0;
}

Then in 

LandingPage.vue
add a style section with this import.

<style lang="scss">
@import "./carbon-overrides";
</style>

Note: We don’t have to include this in a separate file, but it’s nice to keep overrides separate from your application’s styling so when migrating to future Carbon versions and if there are breaking changes via different class names, you have a consolidated list of styling declaration blocks to review. We can now add our images and text for each column in the first 

CvTab
in 
LandingPage.vue
.

<cv-tab label="About">
  <div class="cds--grid cds--grid--no-gutter cds--grid--full-width">
    <div class="cds--row landing-page__tab-content">
      <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-7">
        <h2 class="landing-page__subheading">What is Carbon?</h2>
        <p class="landing-page__p">
          Carbon is IBM’s open-source design system for digital
          products and experiences. With the IBM Design Language as
          its foundation, the system consists of working code, design

Now let’s set the image size in the style section of 

LandingPage.vue
:

.landing-page__illo {
  max-width: 100%;
}

Assuming that the second and third tab would have a similar design, we would set them up in the same way. However, since our design specs don’t show those tabs, we’ll leave the code as is.

Third row

The third row will be created in a later tutorial, so we’ll just add the headers for now.

<div class="cds--row landing-page__r3">
  <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-4">
    <h3 class="landing-page__label">The Principles</h3>
  </div>
  <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-4">Carbon is Open</div>
  <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-4">Carbon is Modular</div>
  <div class="cds--col-md-4 cds--col-lg-4">Carbon is Consistent</div>
</div>

Style landing page

We’ve added basic layout styles in 

LandingPage.vue
, so now let’s add type, color and spacing styles to match the design. We’ll be using our spacing tokens. In a new file 
src/styles/_carbon-utils.scss
, add these imports at the top of the file so we can use Carbon breakpoints, tokens, and typography Sass mixins and functions:

@import 'carbon-components/scss/globals/scss/vendor/@carbon/type/scss/font-family.scss';
@import 'carbon-components/scss/globals/scss/vendor/@carbon/layout/scss/breakpoint.scss';
@import 'carbon-components/scss/globals/scss/typography.scss';
@import 'carbon-components/scss/globals/scss/vars.scss';

Adding these tokens, mixins etc. here means we can import them with a single line into any component that needs them.

Banner vertical spacing

Banner vertical spacing

Pro tip: 

CTRL-G
toggles the grid in Sketch.

Back to 

LandingPage.vue
, we need to add space above the breadcrumb and below the heading. For that, add:

@import '../../styles/carbon-utils';

with the other imports and

.landing-page__banner {
  padding-top: $spacing-05;
  padding-bottom: $spacing-07 * 4;
}

Referencing the spacing token table, 

16px
can be set with the 
$spacing-05
token. The design calls for 
128px
of space below the heading and that’s not in the spacing scale, we can achieve that in Sass by multiplying 32px (
$spacing-07
) by 4. We could use 
128px
or 
8rem
directly in our styling, but using our tokens preserves consistency should the token values get updated in the future.

Looking at the design, we need a wall-to-wall light gray background behind the banner and also behind the third row. This is a great opportunity to use a Sass mixin. We could put this at the top of 

LandingPage.vue
, but it’s best practice to place mixins in a dedicated file, so create a 
_mixins.scss
file in 
src/views/LandingPage
.

Add the following in 

_mixins.scss
. Per the design we need to use Gray 10 for our banner background color, which can be set with the 
$ui-01
color token. Also, we want the background to extend into the grid’s outermost gutters to go the full width of the viewport, so given the DOM structure, we can achieve that by setting the background in an absolutely positioned pseudo element.

@mixin landing-page-background() {
  background-color: $ui-01;
  position: relative;


  &::before {
    content: '';
    position: absolute;
    left: -$spacing-06;
    top: 0;

After you have created 

_mixins.scss
, import it at the top of 
LandingPage.vue
. By now you should have three imports:

@import '../../styles/carbon-utils';
@import './carbon-overrides';
@import './mixins';

Now to use the new mixin, update the 

.landing-page__banner
declaration block to:

.landing-page__banner {
  padding-top: $spacing-05;
  padding-bottom: $spacing-07 * 4;
  @include landing-page-background;
}

Next, we can see that the 

h1
is using the 
heading-05
type token.

Banner heading type

Banner heading type

The Sketch symbol naming is consistent with the development Sass tokens to help translate design to development. So, looking up the type token, we know to use 

productive-heading-05
:

.landing-page__heading {
  @include type-style('productive-heading-05');
}

Row two

For our second row, we need to fix the tabs vertical positioning to match the design. By inspecting the tabs component, you can see that the tab height computes to 

40px
. We can use that to create our negative top margin in rem units.

.landing-page__r2 {
  margin-top: rem(-40px);
}

We also need to adjust our vertical spacing and type treatment. Like before, it’s a matter of using spacing and type tokens like so:

Row 2 vertical spacing

Row 2 vertical spacing

Note: You may be wondering why there are vertical gaps between the type and spacers. Each type token has a line height that’s suited for its font size. The vertical spacers adjacently touch the line height boundaries and not the baseline, for consistency as well as development ease so 

margins
and 
paddings
don’t need to offset line heights.

.landing-page__tab-content {
  padding-top: $layout-05;
  padding-bottom: $layout-05;
}


.landing-page__subheading {
  @include type-style('productive-heading-03');
  @include font-weight('semibold');
}

Row three

Row 3 vertical spacing

Row 3 vertical spacing

Let’s also add some styles for the last row, even though that will get used later in the tutorial. You’ll notice that we get to re-use the 

landing-page-background
mixin that we just created.

.landing-page__r3 {
  padding-top: $spacing-09;
  padding-bottom: $spacing-09;
  @include landing-page-background;
}


.landing-page__label {
  @include type-style('heading-01');
}

Ta-da! You should see a finished landing page! Now we can move on to the repo page.

Add repo page grid

Now in our 

RepoPage.vue
we’ll add our grid containers in the template section.

<template>
  <div class="cds--grid cds--grid--full-width cds--grid--no-gutter repo-page">
    <div class="cds--row repo-page__r1">
      <div class="cds--col-lg-16">Data table will go here</div>
    </div>
  </div>
</template>

Build repo page

We currently have 

RepoPage.vue
that just contains a grid and placeholder content for the time being. In the next tutorial step we’re going to be querying an API to populate the 
CvDataTable
component in this page. As a best practice to separate data fetching from the presentation components, go ahead and create a 
RepoTable.vue
as a sibling to 
RepoPage.vue
in 
src/views/RepoPage
.

Build data table

First, let’s pretend we’ve already built our table component and update 

RepoPage.vue
with a script section.

Import 

RepoTable
in 
RepoPage.vue
.

<script>
import RepoTable from "./RepoTable";


export default {
  name: "RepoPage"
};
</script>

Then below the import, include the following arrays to pass into the 

RepoTable
component. We’ll be setting the 
rows
array from an API in the next tutorial step, but for now, static example rows will suffice.

const headers = [
  {
    key: 'name',
    header: 'Name',
  },
  {
    key: 'createdAt',
    header: 'Created',
  },

Next we need to make sure the RepoTable component and these arrays are available to our 

RepoPage
component template. Your component export should look like the following to achieve this.

export default {
  name: 'RepoPage',
  components: { RepoTable },
  data() {
    return {
      headers,
      rows,
    };
  },

Here we used the data method of the component as the values logically are data in our component.

Lastly in the 

RepoPage.vue
template, we need to simply replace 
Data table will go here
with:

<repo-table
  :headers="headers"
  :rows="rows"
  title="Carbon Repositories"
  helperText="A collection of public Carbon repositories."
/>

OK. So now our 

RepoPage.vue
component is ready to use a component called ‘RepoTable’ so let’s create it so our page displays again.

First create a script section as follows:

<script>
  export default {
    name: 'RepoTable',
    props: {
      headers: Array,
      rows: Array,
      title: String,
      helperText: String,
    },

In this component script we:

  • Named our new component 
    RepoTable
    .
  • Added component properties for the headers and rows as well as two further properties title and helperText.
  • Added the computed properties columns and headers which transform headers and rows into a format convenient for rendering with the CvDataTable components.

Next, let’s create the 

RepoTable
template starting with the cv-data-table component.

<template>
  <cv-data-table :columns="columns" :title="title" :helper-text="helperText">
  </cv-data-table>
</template>

Here we pass in the columns, title and helper text. If you view this you will see an empty table with headings.

Next add the rows inside of cv-data-table.

<template slot="data">
  <cv-data-table-row v-for="(row, rowIndex) in data" :key="`${rowIndex}`"> </cv-data-table-row>
</template>

Here we use v-for to iterate through the data assigning a key and value to each row. The rendered output may not appear to have changed, although if you inspect using the developer tools you will find three empty rows. Next add the cell data inside the 

cv-data-table-row
component.

<cv-data-table-cell
  v-for="(cell, cellIndex) in row.data"
  :key="`${cellIndex}`"
  >{{cell}}</cv-data-table-cell
>

Again we’ve used the v-for directive to iterate through our data adding key, value and the contents of the cell.

The last item we need to add is the description shown in the expanded content. Add the following as a sibling of cv-data-table-cell component.

<template slot="expandedContent">
{{ row.description }}
</template>

Now you should have a working page rendering the sample content from the rows array.

This component consumes our properties and returns a Carbon 

CvDataTable
. As for where the various 
CvDataTable*
components came from? The CvDataTable story in Storybook was used to put together the data table structure.

Style repo page

Our styles for the repo page are mostly fine. We just need to update a few vertical spacing issues.

In 

RepoPage.vue
, add the following style section:

<style lang="scss">
@import '../../styles/carbon-utils';


.repo-page .cds--row {
  padding-top: $spacing-05;
  padding-bottom: $spacing-05;
}
</style>

Congratulations! We’ve now created our static repo page!

Submit pull request

We’re going to submit a pull request to verify completion of this tutorial step.

Continuous integration (CI) check

Run the CI check to make sure we’re all set to submit a pull request.

yarn ci-check

Note: Having issues running the CI check? Step 1 has troubleshooting notes that may help.

Git commit and push

Before we can create a pull request, stage and commit all of your changes:

git add --all && git commit -m "feat(tutorial): complete step 2"

Then, push to your repository:

git push origin vue-step-2

Note: Having issues pushing your changes? Step 1 has troubleshooting notes that may help.

Pull request (PR)

Finally, visit carbon-tutorial-vue to “Compare & pull request”. In doing so, make sure that you are comparing to 

vue-step-2
into 
base: vue-step-2
.

Note: Expect your tutorial step PRs to be reviewed by the Carbon team but not merged. We’ll close your PR so we can keep the repository’s remote branches pristine and ready for the next person!

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