kibana/ui_framework

Kibana UI Framework

The Kibana UI Framework is a collection of React UI components for quickly building user interfaces for Kibana. Not using React? No problem! You can still use the CSS behind each component.

Using the Framework

Documentation

You can view interactive documentation by running npm run uiFramework:start and then visiting http://localhost:8020/.

React components

Here are the components you can import from the Framnework:

import {
  KuiButton,
  KuiButtonGroup,
  KuiButtonIcon,
} from '../path/to/ui_framework/components';

Creating components

There are four steps to creating a new component:

1. Create the SCSS for the component in ui_framework/components.
2. Create the React portion of the component.
3. Document it with examples in ui_framework/doc_site.
4. Write tests.

Create component SCSS

1. Create a directory for your component in ui_framework/components.
2. In this directory, create _{component name}.scss.
3. Optional: Create any other components that should be logically-grouped in this directory.
4. Create an _index.scss file in this directory that import all of the new component SCSS files you created.
5. Import the _index.scss file into ui_framework/components/index.scss.

This makes your styles available to Kibana and the UI Framework documentation.

Create the React component

1. Create the React component(s) in the same directory as the related SCSS file(s).
2. Export these components from an index.js file.
3. Re-export these components from ui_framework/components/index.js.

This makes your React component available for import into Kibana.

Document the component with examples

1. Create a directory for your example in ui_framework/doc_site/src/views. Name it the name of the component.
2. Create a {component name}_example.js file inside the directory. You'll use this file to define the different examples for your component.
3. Add the route to this file in ui_framework/doc_site/src/services/routes/Routes.js.
4. In the {component name}_example.js file you created, define examples which demonstrate the component and describe its role from a UI perspective.

The complexity of the component should determine how many examples you need to create, and how complex they should be. In general, your examples should demonstrate:

• The most common use-cases for the component.
• How the component handles edge cases, e.g. overflowing content, text-based vs. element-based content.
• The various states of the component, e.g. disabled, selected, empty of content, error state.

Test the component

1. Create test files with the name pattern of {component name}.test.js.
2. Create your tests.
3. Run tests with npm run uiFramework:test.

You can check how well the components have been covered by the tests by viewing the generated report at ui_framework/jest/report/index.html.

React component development tips

You can run npm run uiFramework:dev to watch your files and automatically run the tests when you make changes. Under this command, the tests will run faster than under uiFramework:test because they'll only test the files you've changed -- the code coverage report won't be re-genereated, however.

Principles

Logically-grouped components

If a component has subcomponents (e.g. ToolBar and ToolBarSearch), tightly-coupled components (e.g. Button and ButtonGroup), or you just want to group some related components together (e.g. TextInput, TextArea, and CheckBox), then they belong in the same logicaly grouping. In this case, you can create additional SCSS files for these components in the same component directory.

Writing CSS

Check out our CSS style guide.

Benefits

Dynamic, interactive documentation

By having a "living style guide", we relieve our designers of the burden of creating and maintaining static style guides. This also makes it easier for our engineers to translate mockups, prototypes, and wireframes into products.

Copy-pasteable UI

Engineers can copy and paste sample code into their projects to quickly get reliable, consistent results.

Remove CSS from the day-to-day

The CSS portion of this framework means engineers don't need to spend mental cycles translating a design into CSS. These cycles can be spent on the things critical to the identity of the specific project they're working on, like architecture and business logic.

If they use the React components, engineers won't even need to see CSS -- it will be encapsulated behind the React components' interfaces.

More UI tests === fewer UI bugs

By covering our UI components with great unit tests and having those tests live within the framework itself, we can rest assured that our UI layer is tested and remove some of that burden from our integration/end-to-end tests.

Why not just use Bootstrap?

In short: we've outgrown it! Third-party CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and Foundation are designed for a general audience, so they offer things we don't need and don't offer things we do need. As a result, we've been forced to override their styles until the original framework is no longer recognizable. When the CSS reaches that point, it's time to take ownership over it and build your own framework.

We also gain the ability to fix some of the common issues with third-party CSS frameworks:

• They have non-semantic markup.
• They deeply nest their selectors.

For a more in-depth analysis of the problems with Bootstrap (and similar frameworks), check out this article and the links it has at the bottom: "Bootstrap Bankruptcy".

Examples of other in-house UI frameworks

• Smaato React UI Framework
• Ubiquiti CSS Framework
• GitHub's Primer
• Palantir's Blueprint
• Lonely Planet Style Guide
• MailChimp Patterns Library
• Salesforce Lightning Design System
• Refills
• Formstone
• Element VueJS Framework