JDeveloper 10.1.3.4.0: Controlling HTML formatting of ADF Faces components

Question

I have been investigating the ADF Faces components, and some of them write a fairly substantial block of HTML to the browser.
The inputText, for example, renders an HTML table containing, among other things, an input, required field indicator, and a span for error display.
This would appear to limit the amount of control a page designer would have over the precise layout of these sub-elements.
We are en E-Commerce shop, so the ability to control the exact layout of our pages is critical to our business.
Are the ADF Faces components going to allow us the fine-grained UI control we need?
It could be a coincidence, but it seems as if all the real-world application examples in the ADF documentation seem to be business-type applications,
where the UI is right out of the box with minimal tweaking.
Thanks,
Jonathan

Answer 1

Jonathan,
For a label above the text you can use this:
            <af:group>
              <af:outputLabel value="outputLabel1"/>
              <af:inputText/>
            </af:group>You can also achieve a lot of other customization with skins for ADF Faces components.
But more to the point - since the JSF components offer you more then just basic HTML component I guess there might be a limit to the customization you can do to them.
At the end your company will need to make the call on what is more valuable - the ability to stick exactly to a style or the ability to use components with rich functionality that save you coding.
Think for example how much coding on the client you'll need to do in standard JSP/HTML to achieve what the ADF Table component gives you out of the box (sorting, range paging, detail disclosure, banding, etc). Maybe it is worthwhile to be a little more flexible on the layout issues instead of ending up wasting a lot of time writing these code.
In any case even if you choose to go with plain JSP and Struts or with plain JSF and the plain JSF components - the ADF framework will still enable you to do drag and drop binding to your UI.
The benefit of the ADF Faces components is the built in functionality they provide with things like partial page rendering, Ajax functionality etc...