Migrating Dasher 360 to use the Forge viewer v4.2 – Part 1

Over the last few days I’ve been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance.

To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here’s what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher 360:

Dasher 360 jumping from v3.2 to v4.2 of the Forge viewer

After these few days of work – with a fair amount of CSS hacking – I’ve arrived at something much more presentable:

Starting to shape up

During the next post or two I’ll take a look at some of the specific changes I’ve had to make to Dasher 360 for it to work with the latest version of the Forge viewer. It will hopefully give a sense for some of the challenges we’ve faced, but also highlight how being so tightly coupled with the…

Read more