ADF: Direct ADF component skin appearance

Have you ever wanted to make an ADF Faces Rich Client component have a unique appearance but not change all other instances of that component? You can as long as the things you want to change are not skin properties or skin icons (server-side aspects like properties and icons are not part of the client-side generated style sheet so this client-side solution will not allow you to change them).

Let’s start with an interactive example; the skinning demo pages for the ADF Faces Rich Client:
http://jdevadf.oracle.com/adf-richclient-demo/components/skinningKeys/inputText.jspx

On this page, there is a right-hand side where you can see some example inputText components.  When you click on the checkboxes on the left-hand side of this page, the appearance of those start to change.  However, the inputText for the find field at the top of the page does not change.  This is because of some containment selector definitions in the skin used on this page that confines the custom styling to instances of the inputText that are contained in another component that has a particular style class.  Since the find field is not inside of that container, these custom styles do not apply to that field.

Let’s say your page has a structure like this:

<af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" layout="scroll" styleClass="SpecialMarker">
  <af:inputText id="it1" label="Name"/>
</af:panelGroupLayout>

To style that inputText specially in this container, you would create skinning definitions like this:

.SpecialMarker af|inputText {background-color:pink}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::access-key {color: aqua;}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::content {background-color:red}
.SpecialMarker af|inputText::label {font-weight: bold}

Alternatively, you could put your marker directly on the inputText like this:

<af:inputText id="it1" label="Name" styleClass="SpecialMarker"/>

and have skinning definitions like this:

af|inputText.SpecialMarker {background-color:pink}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::access-key {color: aqua;}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::content {background-color:red}
af|inputText.SpecialMarker af|inputText::label {font-weight: bold}