Layout with Look and Feel - Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide - page 198

Skinning is an important task in any web applicaion because styling makes the applicaion
presentable and will atract user traic. CSS customizes the appearance of the web applicaion
and allows a consistent look and feel throughout the website.

What is a skin?
A skin is a stylesheet based on a CSS 3.0 standard deined for the enire applicaion. The skin
will provide a visual change in the appearance of the applicaion at runime.

Some of the advantages of skinning are as follows:

Styling the applicaion
Customizing the web components
Changing the runime labels

In ADF 11gR2, we have a skinning editor IDE that is used to skin and style the applicaion
visually. The skin editor is used to create a skin for the web applicaion without wriing its
code manually. All the acions in the IDE add the necessary content in the .css ile, and
the skin is made ready for our use.

In the following screenshot, we can see the different types of skinning that is possible using
ADF 11gR2:

Name is customized Added a help in the

label

background for text field

C ? Name:

R eadonly: hello

disabled text field
color can be changed

customize the label

Disabled: hello

You can truncate readOnly text using skinning. We've set styleClass='truncate'.
This is truncated text in a read-only field. We are testing truncation. We have
set the styleClass attribute to a 'marker' styleclass. It can be any name, but in
this demo we use truncate. We truncate using skinning.

ReadOnly
Label:

background changed

ADF 11gR2 uses the fusionFx skin for all applicaions by default. ADF allows the user to
change the skin that has to be applied for the applicaion. The skins are conigured using
the trinidad-config.xml ile to use the user-deined skins for the applicaion. The ADF
Faces component provides a wide range of skins to be selected for the applicaion. They are
simple , fusion , fusionFx , blafplus , blafplus-medium , blafplus-rich , fusion-
simple , fusionFx-simple , and so on. The simple skin will have minimal formaing and
the blafplus skins will have a modest skinning and formaing style. The fusion skins will
define the default ADF Faces component styles. Each of these skins will inherit some styles
from the parent skins.