New version of Ext JS, 2.2.1, is announced and we are so happy, aren’t we? ;)

Another Ext JS news: Ext Conference 2009. I wish, I could attend. I hope, I am going to be there in the next conference…

In this short tutorial, I am going to show you to simply the icon management in Ext JS. It is not a complete solution. If you want to see a more professional one, see Ext.ux.TDGi.iconMgr from TDG innovations.

When you want to use icons in your Ext JS application you either have to use icon config option by giving path to your icon or iconCls by defining a new CSS class. The latter one is more prefferable way of doing it but it means that you need to define a CSS class for each of your icons. Let’s create a new function to make it easy!

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Ext.ux.Icon = function(icon){
  var path = 'img/icons/';
  if(!Ext.util.CSS.getRule('.icon-'+icon)){
    Ext.util.CSS.createStyleSheet('.icon-'+icon+' { background-image: url('path+icon+'.png) !important; }');
  }
  return 'icon-'+icon;
}

Change the value of path where your PNG icons are located. Don’t tell me you don’t hear the famous icon collection from famfamfam!

And call it like:

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...,
iconCls: Ext.ux.Icon('excel'),
...,

It is going to add a new CSS rule icon-excel with background-image excel.png and add it to the head of your page.

I can hear you say why you have to use PNG extension? You are right, you don’t have. Just modify Ext.ux.Icon by adding a second argument, maybe, called as extension and pass the icon’s extension:

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Ext.ux.Icon = function(icon, extension){
  var path = 'img/icons/';
  if(!Ext.util.CSS.getRule('.icon-'+icon)){
    Ext.util.CSS.createStyleSheet('.icon-'+icon+' { background-image: url('path+icon+'.'+extension+') !important; }');
  }
  return 'icon-'+icon;
}

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...,
iconCls: Ext.ux.Icon('excel', 'png'),
...,

or by removing the extension part and passing the name of icon with its extension:

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Ext.ux.Icon = function(icon){
  var path = 'img/icons/';
  if(!Ext.util.CSS.getRule('.icon-'+icon)){
    Ext.util.CSS.createStyleSheet('.icon-'+icon+' { background-image: url('path+icon+') !important; }');
  }
  return 'icon-'+icon;
}

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...,
iconCls: Ext.ux.Icon('excel.png'),
...,

Don’t use Ext.ux.Icon if you are going to use hundreds of CSS rules because each class is defined in its own “style” tag and it can affect browser rendering performance.

It’s not important what you think, it’s important what you do… :)