About Look and Feel Customization

ADF UIX lets you change the appearance or look and feel of an application without having to rewrite the UIX code that implements the application's user interface. UIX provides two parent look and feels, Base Look and Feel and Simple Look and Feel, which you can extend to provide custom look and feels for your applications.

By default a custom look and feel inherits the appearance of its parent look and feel. When you wish to modify the appearance of a component, you simply provide custom style definitions, custom icons, or a custom Renderer for that component. All the properties of a custom look and feel, including which parent look and feel it is extending, are defined in a look and feel configuration file.

Note that you do not have to write custom Renderers or Java code to create a custom look and feel. You can also extend a parent look and feel by providing a custom style sheet. Each custom look and feel can have its own style sheet with its own style values. The UIX style sheets containing the style definitions that implement the parent look and feels are base-desktop.xss and simple-desktop.xss. A custom style sheet extends the styles defined in the style sheet of the parent look and feel. You can provide one or more sets of styles for one or more particular user environments (e.g., browsers, platforms, and locales) in a custom style sheet. At runtime, the custom styles are automatically merged on top of the parent style sheet.

You can meet your user's corporate UI standards across a number of applications with a custom look and feel:

To provide customized styles, create a custom style sheet that extends the style sheet of the parent look and feel. Then specify the custom style sheet in the look and feel configuration file.
To replace customizable icons (e.g., error and tip icons), register the custom image icons or text-based icons declaratively in the look and feel configuration file. You can also specify the width and height for the custom icon.
To implement custom Renderers for components, register the custom Renderers declaratively in the look and feel configuration file. You can use template-based or Java-based custom Renderers to override one or more Renderers in the parent look and feel. A template-based Renderer is a UIX XML template (UIT) file (e.g., pageLayout.uit); a Java-based Renderer is a Java class (e.g., org.example.laf.custom.TabBarRenderer ).

Note: Customizable style class names and icon names are provided in the UIX Customization Reference.

Once the contents of a custom look and feel have been defined, you have to register the custom look and feel with UIX before you can use it in your application.

In summary, to provide a custom look and feel for an application, you would do the following: