@Ruckus Fantastic work as always! @carlw Inline styles work of course, but since Text instances doesn't get the

text

class assigned to them by default, you'd have to add it manually or create your own like Matthew showed in his answer.

I was a little surprised that the dark background didn't get picked up when setting the text manually. BTW the whole thing works if text() is replaced by label()

@carlw Yes, because labels are controls and have the text class. It's a bit counter intuitive, but from what I understand,

Text

objects can be styled more than labels. (I'm not sure how true that is in practice as I've never tried)

I find it a bit frustrating that they didn't add the

text

class to Text instances by default. Same for other controls. Wonder what the rationale is there.

My guess is it has something to do with

Text

being a

Shape

, but I couldn't say for sure.

It's still a bad (and very counter intuitive) design either way

Yeah they're all styleable nodes

A Label actually contains a Text element.

So with that in mind, a Label should be more styleable, since it has a surrounding container.

Ah. indeed. I guess I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification!

Huh.. I just checked. A Label contains a LabeledText instance, which does have the .text class.

A single Text node would not though.

LabeledText does extend Text.

Don't forget a label might not have any text at all if it's graphic only

@Ruckus why does the scene need a control rather than a node have a container style take effect? I'm still not sure why the OP tfx code changes the background only after switching text() for label()

In java that doesn't seem to be the case

@carlw It's not for the style to take effect, but for the

baseColor

. In your Java version, you set the background color, which works either way, but in your TFX version you set the base color. The base color property is used to change the theme color of modena, but only works if there is at least one control in the scene graph.

I'm not entirely sure why that's the case, and I don't know if it's a limitation of modena or JavaFX.

Basically, OP tried to set two properties in their CSS. The first didn't work because it was the wrong property, and the second didn't work because they targeted the wrong class. The styles were working, they just didn't apply to anything in the scene graph.

@Ruckus so you need to have at least one control and not one node in the scene graph? Is there a rationale behind this or has this just not been an issue

I'm not entirely sure why that's the case, and I don't know if it's a limitation of modena or JavaFX. Slack Conversation

@carlw To figure out the rationale behind it, @jonathan may be able to point you in the right direction, but it may be easier to reach out to him on Twitter or something.

Ok

I'm going to meet the javafx authors tonight!

My guess would be there's some sort of optimization happening in JavaFX since

Control

implements

Skinnable

, so if there are no controls (or maybe skinnables?) in the scene graph it can skip loading some resources, and a side effect is modena doesn't get its theming applies, but that's a total guess.

Awesome! Whereat?

Here at the conference. They have an evening session

That's pretty cool. I wish I could have made it.

I don't think he's at JavaOne this year... https://twitter.com/JonathanGiles/status/900139996555862017

No he's not. It's actually the javafx client team at oracle so maybe not the founders.