Best reference for JavaFX CSS properties & selectors

Question

I'm trying to learn JavaFX 2, but I've been stumbling a lot trying to style my application. I've found this document which tries to document controls and the css properties that apply to them. I can't tell if it's incomplete, if I should be using some unknown selectors or JavaFX's CSS support just isn't powerful enough for my needs.

Here are a couple of examples:

• How would I change the background color for the area behind a TabPane without coloring every other child component (is there a selector for that, or perhaps a property?)
• How would I change the color of non-selected tabs?

Answer 1

Have you tried something like this?

This uses an ID selector as shown in the "Skinning JavaFX Applications with CSS" document. You could also leave off the "#MyTabPane" selector and have it apply to all TabPane's. (It looks like the .tab and .tab-content-area selectors are not discussed in the reference guide. I went to the "caspian.css" file contained in jfxrt.jar file to find them.)

TabExample.css

#MyTabPane .tab {
    -fx-background-color: blue;
}
#MyTabPane .tab:selected {
    -fx-background-color: red;
}

#MyTabPane .tab-content-area {
    -fx-background-color: cyan;
}

#MyTabPane .tab *.tab-label {
    -fx-text-fill: white;
}

TabPaneEx.java

@Override
    public void start(Stage primaryStage) {
        primaryStage.setTitle("Hello World");
        StackPane root = new StackPane();
        TabPane pane = new TabPane();
        pane.setId(("MyTabPane"));
        Tab tab1 = new Tab("ONE");
        Tab tab2 = new Tab("TWO");
        Tab tab3 = new Tab("THREE");
        pane.getTabs().addAll(tab1,tab2,tab3);
        Scene scene = new Scene(root, 300, 250);
        root.getChildren().add(pane);
        scene.getStylesheets().add(
                this.getClass().getClassLoader().getResource("tabpaneex/TabExample.css").toString());
        primaryStage.setScene(scene);
        primaryStage.show();
    }