FAQs

The Digital Framework is a solution to having reusable brand-compliant User Interfaces without touching a line of code.

These solutions can be grouped in to 2 different areas:

• A user wants a UI that is directly supported by designers from the Digital Guidelines
• A user who wants their app to be brand compliant but is not supported by the Digital Guidelines.

These are grouped into User Interface components and User Interface Utilities.

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Although JavaScript is not in the distributed assets, there are multiple ways to still use JavaScript easily. To keep platform agnostic we provide JavaScript support classes that can be applied to JavaScript components. These are all documented above the component under the "JavaScript support classes" section. For example:

JavaScript Support class name	Description
slb-show	Add the show class to the modal container to display the modal, removing the class will display nothing.

Alternatively, you can use Bootstraps JavaScript.

For the first production ready release of the Digital Framework a strategic decision was made early on not to provide JavaScript support. There were several reasons for this:

• We didn't want to assume what functionality teams across the company needed, we needed requirements and that was a larger piece of work.
• We didn't want to break applications because of poor JavaScript decisions made without understanding use cases. There are numerous versions of open source frameworks in use across the company, we need to understand how to interoperate if need be.
• We didn't want to release a poor quality solution. If using a shared, reusuable JavaScript library, it has to be as good as it needs to be e.g. built with the right technologies, tools, good patterns, well governed, documented, tests etc. More importantly, it needs to be done collaboratively.
• We did want to support as many platforms in Standard Life/Phoenix as possible and not limit a Version 1 release due to a JavaScript dependency we chose.
• We aimed to build a Digital framework that is robust and extendable, meaning we can more easily add on JavaScript support in future.
• We did want to offer an optional JavaScript support in the first release (though not recommended)

This doesn't mean there won't be JavaScript support in future releases, it is on the road plan and work will begin to understand the scope of the requirements soon. This will be a collaborative process and we will be asking for help and contributions as well as sharing decisions and progress.

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There are many ways you can use the toolkit. To get the most out of the toolkit we recommend you use NPM. This can be done with the following command in any npm project.

npm install --registry http://nexus.mlsdev.standardlife.co.uk/nexus/content/groups/npm-all/ @web-dev/digital-framework

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