Asset Manager

Core Module

---

• Introduction
• Usage
• Using in own Theme

Introduction

The asset manager in AsgardCms is a helper to let you load assets faster without making you look at the filesystem to find assets. It is important to note that the asset manager is not a requirement, you can choose not to use it if you wish.

Usage

Asgard Asset Manager is a 2 part package. First there is the manager in which you add all the assets you will need to build your site. This doesn't mean those assets will be included in all files, it merely means they will be ready for the asset pipeline to require them on the page.

Asset Manager

You can add assets on the manager using two different ways:

First and easiest way is to add assets in the config/asgard.core.core.php config file, in the admin-assets key. Those will be added onto the manager.

The second way is to manually calling the AssetManager in a class somewhere. You can do this by injecting the Modules\Core\Foundation\Asset\Manager\AssetManager interface and using the following methods:

/**
 * Add a possible asset
 * @param string $dependency
 * @param string $path
 * @return void
 */
public function addAsset($dependency, $path);

/**
 * Add an array of possible assets
 * @param array $assets
 * @return void
 */
public function addAssets(array $assets);

As you can see you can either pass a dependency name and its path to addAsset, or by sending an array to addAssets. That array needs to have as key the dependency name and value the path to that dependency.

Asset Pipeline

After adding all possible dependencies on the asset manager, you are ready to require them on a page.

As you might already have seen, in the config/asgard.core.core.php file there is a admin-required-assets (which calls all assets by its name defined on the asset manager). This key sets all default assets that will always be included on the AdminLTE theme.

If a particular view needs a couple more assets, you can define those in the controller method that handles that view.

For instance a Page Edit view, needs CkEditor and a css file for the iCheck jQuery plugin. Those are not loaded on every view.

To add them onto the view I call these methods to require those assets:

$this->assetPipeline->requireJs('ckeditor.js');
$this->assetPipeline->requireCss('icheck.blue.css');

Remember that those key names ckeditor.js and icheck.blue.css are the dependency names used in the Asset Manager.

Those 2 lines will add these assets on the desired view, that is all.

If you're in an Admin Controller, you have access to the assetPipeline and assetManager properties simply by extending the Modules\Core\Http\Controllers\Admin\AdminBaseController Controller.

Before and After

The asset pipeline also enables you to add an asset at a specific position on the pipeline. Let's say for instance that your javascript plugin requires jQuery, you can call the asset pipeline like so:

$this->assetPipeline->requireJs('jquery-plugin')->after('jquery');

Or if you need it to load before a certain other asset:

$this->assetPipeline->requireJs('jquery-plugin')->before('bootstrap');

Those methods are of course also available for css assets.

Using in your own Theme

If you're on a custom admin or front end theme, you can create a view composer that will add the cssFiles and jsFiles variables onto the views.

The MasterViewComposer in the Core module does this the following way:

$view->with('cssFiles', $this->assetPipeline->allCss());
$view->with('jsFiles', $this->assetPipeline->allJs());

Now in the master layout of the AdminLTE template you can simply loop over those assets:

@foreach($cssFiles as $css)
    <link media="all" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="{{ $css }}">
@endforeach

and :

@foreach($jsFiles as $js)
    <script src="{{ $js }}" type="text/javascript"></script>
@endforeach