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Adding CSS & JS and Overriding the Page-Load Template

Dash apps are rendered in the web browser with CSS and JavaScript. On page load, Dash serves a small HTML template that includes references to the CSS and JavaScript that are required to render the app. This chapter covers everything that you need to know about configuring this HTML file and about including external CSS and JavaScript in Dash apps.

Adding Your Own CSS and JavaScript to Dash Apps

Dash supports adding custom CSS or JavaScript in your apps.

Create a folder named WebRoot in the root of your project and include your CSS and JavaScript files in that folder. Make sure that Copy to Output Directory on the files is set to Copy if Newer or similar. You can then use DashApp.appendScripts [ <list of script names> ] to include your JavaScript files or DashApp.appendCSSLinks [ <list of style sheet names> ] to include your CSS files.

Example: Including Local CSS and JavaScript

We'll create several files: App.fs, a folder named WebRoot, and three files in that folder:

- App.fsproj
- App.fs
- WebRoot/
    |-- typography.css
    |-- header.css
    |-- custom-script.js

App.fs

typography.css

body {
    font-family: sans-serif;
}
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
    color: hotpink
}

header.css

.app-header {
    height: 60px;
    line-height: 60px;
    border-bottom: thin lightgrey solid;
}

.app-header .app-header--title {
    font-size: 22px;
    padding-left: 5px;
}

custom-script.js

alert('If you see this alert, then your custom JavaScript script has run!')

When you run your app, it should look something like this:

Embedding Images in Your Dash Apps

In addition to CSS and JavaScript files, you can include images in the WebRoot folder. An example of the folder structure:

- App.fsproj
- App.fs
- WebRoot/
    |-- image.png

In your App.fs file you can use the relative path to that image:

If placing images inside the WebRoot folder isn't an option, then you can also embed images "inline" with base64 encoding:

Changing the Favicon

It is possible to override the default favicon by adding a file named favicon.ico to your WebRoot folder. Changes to this file will implement cache-busting automatically.

- App.fsproj
- App.fs
- WebRoot/
    |-- favicon.ico

Adding External CSS/JavaScript

You can add resources hosted externally to your Dash app by instead providing a URL instead of a local file path when calling DashApp.appendScripts or DashApp.appendCSSLinks.

Example:

This example has not been ported to F# yet - showing the Python version instead.

Visit the old docs site for F# at: https://community.plotly.com/c/dash/net/26

Controlling the Plotly.js Version Used by DCC.Graph.graph

The DCC.Graph.graph component leverages the Plotly.js library to render visualizations.

You can override the Plotly.js version by placing a Plotly.js bundle in the WebRoot directory.

This technique can be used to:

• take advantage of new features in a version of Plotly.js that is more recent than the one that is included in the currently installed version of Dash or Dash Design Kit.
• take advantage of more desirable behavior of a version of Plotly.js that is less recent than the one that is included in the currently installed version of Dash or Dash Design Kit. We strive to make Plotly.js releases completely backwards-compatible, so you shouldn't have to do this very often.
• use a Plotly-distributed Plotly.js partial bundle or a custom-built Plotly.js bundle which only includes the subset of Plotly.js features that your Dash app uses. Partial bundles are smaller than the full Plotly.js bundles that come with the DCC.Graph.graph component and can therefore improve your app's loading time.

Rendering LaTeX Inside DCC.Graph.graph Figures

To use the built-in Plotly.js capability of rendering LaTeX inside figure labels, the DashApp.appendScripts functionality described above can be used: add app.appendScripts ["https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/mathjax/2.7.5/MathJax.js?config=TeX-MML-AM_CHTML"] to the let app = DashApp.initDefault() call.

Customizing Dash's Document or Browser Tab Title

The document title is the name of the web page that appears in your web browser's tab.

By default, it is Dash.

You can customize this title with the AppTitle property of the IndexView:

let app =
    DashApp.initDefault()
    .mapIndex (fun index ->
        { index with
            AppTitle = "Weekly Analytics" })

Customizing or Removing Dash's "Updating..." Message

When a callback is running, Dash updates the document title (the title that appears in your browser tab) with the "Updating..." message.

Customize this message with the UpdateTitle property of the Config:

let app =
    DashApp.initDefault()
    .withConfig
        { DashConfig.initDefault() with
            UpdateTitle = "Loading..." }

Customizing Dash's HTML Index Template

Dash's UI is generated dynamically with Dash's React.js front-end. So, on page load, Dash serves a very small HTML template string that includes the CSS and JavaScript that is necessary to render the page and some simple HTML meta tags.

This simple HTML string is customizable. You might want to customize this string if you wanted to:

• Customize the way that your CSS or JavaScript is included in the page. For example, if you wanted to include remote scripts or if you wanted to include the CSS before the Dash component CSS
• Include custom meta tags in your app. Note that meta tags can also be added with the Metas property of the IndexView (example below).
• Include a custom version of dash-renderer, by instantiating the DashRenderer JavaScript class yourself. You can add request hooks this way, by providing a hooks config object as in the example below.

Customizing dash-renderer with Request Hooks

To instantiate your own version of dash-renderer, you can override IndexView.renderer like so:

When you provide your own DashRenderer, you can also pass in a hooks object that holds request_pre and request_post functions. These request hooks will be fired before and after Dash makes a request to its backend. Here's an example:

Notice the request_pre function takes the payload of the request being sent as its argument, and the request_post function takes both the payload and the response of the server as arguments. These can be altered in our function, allowing you to modify the response and request objects that Dash sends to the server. In the example above, the request_pre function is fired before each server call, and in the case of this example, it will console.log() the request parameter. The request_post function will fire after each server call, and in our example will also print out the response parameter.

Customizing Meta Tags

Not sure what meta tags are? Check out this tutorial on meta tags and why you might want to use them.

Dash adds some meta tags to your app by default:

• A tag to tell Internet Explorer to use the latest renderer available for that browser:

  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">

• A tag to set the encoding to UTF-8:

  <meta charset="UTF-8">

• And in Dash 2.5 and later, a tag to control page layouts on mobile browsers:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

Overriding Default Tags

To override or add custom meta tags to your app, you can specify meta tags directly in the Dash constructor:

• To clear the name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" tag (introduced in Dash 2.5), set an empty tag:

  app = Dash(__name__, meta_tags=[{"viewport": ""}])

• To override the http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" meta tag, set a new one:

  app = Dash(__name__, meta_tags=[{'http-equiv': 'X-UA-Compatible', 'content': 'IE=9'}])

• To override the charset meta tag, set a new one:

  app = Dash(__name__, meta_tags=[{'charset': 'iso-8859-1'}])

Adding Additional Tags

You can also add additional tags. Here's an example of adding description and robots meta tags.

If you inspect the source of your app, you'll see the meta tags. In this example, there are the two custom tags we added, along with the three default meta tags.

Sample Dash CSS Stylesheet

Currently, Dash does not include styles by default.

To get started with Dash styles, we recommend starting with this CSS stylesheet hosted on Codepen.

To include this stylesheet in your app, copy and paste it into a file in your WebRoot folder and add it to your app with DashApp.appendCSSLinks. You can view the raw CSS source here: https://codepen.io/chriddyp/pen/bWLwgP.css.

Here is an embedded version of this stylesheet.

Syntax Highlighting With Markdown

Both dash-table and dash-core-components support Markdown formatting, which you can use to specify syntax highlighting for inline code.

Highlighting is handled by highlight.js. By default, only certain languages are recognized, and there is only one color scheme available. However, you can override this by downloading a custom highlight.js package. To do this, visit https://highlightjs.org/download/, and in the Custom package section, select all the languages that you require, download your package, and place the resulting highlight.min.js file into the WebRoot folder and add it to your app with DashApp.appendScripts. The package should also come with a styles/ directory; to use a different color scheme, copy the corresponding stylesheet into your app's WebRoot folder and add it to your app with DashApp.appendCSSLinks.