The Dashboard team received several questions by email about designing panels using HTML, CSS and other tools. We thought the answers should be on the forum somewhere, so I’m just posting the questions and answers here.
Is it possible to design a custom panel utilizing HTML5, CSS, and Javascript and simply import it into Dashboard. Adding onto that would be once its in Dashboard being able to add more things into the design similar to how in the webinar he was adding Ross pieces into the custom panel.
No, we don’t support this.
HTML and OGLML/ogScript are a little too different to do this. We could probably translate the basic structures but the rest of the capabilities of how JavaScript typically interacts with the HTML DOM would be unrealistic to support.
If a design is made in Dashboard is it possible to get access to underlying files to work with the CSS directly instead of through the software
No. Since OGLML is a bit different than HTML, we’d need to introduce a conversion tool to support this and don’t have plans to do this.
OGLML doesn't quite have the same structure as HTML. The closest it has to CSS is the style tag. Loading the style tags from an external source has been on our 'would be nice' list for a while - it theoretically would work today using an <include/> tag in a <meta/> (but we haven't verified this)
Is it possible to write "ogScript" outside of Dashboard. I looked for an ogscript extension in VSCode but didn't see any.
ogScript is simply Javascript plus some custom APIs that work with some of the DashBoard features (like parameters).
You can certainly write ogScript outside DashBoard. You can use the Javascript settings to do syntax highlighting. But you wouldn’t be able to access any of the objects that expose the custom API.
You can create an API tag in DashBoard and point it to the outside ogScript file.
