Lighten color from parent in Less - less

Question

I am starting out with Less and one of the reasons I wanted to is because of the ligthen() function. So my first attempt was to do something with that.
This is my HTML
<div class="box blue">
<div class="boxbar">Foo</div>
blue
</div>
I finally got it working, but I doubt it's supposed be like this:
#blue: #468ACE;
#green: #41A53D;
#red: #9C2525;
#purple: #8938BF;
div
{
padding: 10px;
}
.blue {
background-color: #blue;
.boxbar { background-color: lighten(#blue, 10%); }
}
.green {
background-color: #green;
.boxbar { background-color: lighten(#green, 10%); }
}
.red {
background-color: #red;
.boxbar { background-color: lighten(#red, 10%); }
}
.purple {
background-color: #purple;
.boxbar { background-color: lighten(#purple, 10%); }
}
.boxbar
{
height: 10px;
}
How can I refactor this? Surely it must be easier to say "get your parent color, and lighten it a bit". I tried a couple of things: inherit (was worth a shot!), have the lightened versions inside .boxcar. But this obviously compiled to .boxcar .blue.. which is not what I want and I ended with what you can see here.. it works.. but it doesn't feel right. Then I would need to write code for every new color I introduce..

Answer 1

I am not completely sure what your desired solution would be ... but maybe something like making a mixin would help you from having to write so much stuff out.
LESS:
.bgmixin(#color) {
(~".#{color}") {
background-color: ##color;
.boxbar {
background-color: lighten(##color, 10%);
}
}
}
#blue: #468ACE;
#green: #41A53D;
#red: #9C2525;
.bgmixin("blue");
.bgmixin("green");
.bgmixin("red");
CSS:
.blue{
background-color: #468ace;
}
.blue .boxbar {
background-color: #6ea3d9;
}
.green{
background-color: #41a53d;
}
.green .boxbar {
background-color: #59c055;
}
.red{
background-color: #9c2525;
}
.red .boxbar{
background-color: #c52f2f;
}
Update:
In LESS>=1.4 you would want to use something like this to interpolate the class name from the color name:
.bgmixin(#color) {
#classname: ~"#{color}";
.#{classname} {
background-color: ##color;
.boxbar {
background-color: lighten(##color, 10%);
}
}
}