Custom CSS Pseudo-classes

You can set your custom CSS pseudo-classes on the nodes from the AuthorDocument model. These are similar to the normal XML attributes, with the important difference that they are not serialized, and by changing them the document does not create undo and redo edits - the document is considered unmodified. You can use custom pseudo-classes for changing the style of an element (and its children) without altering the document.

In Oxygen XML Editor they are used to hide/show the colspec elements from CALS tables. To take a look at the implementation, see:

[OXYGEN_DIR]/frameworks/docbook/css/cals_table.css (Search for -oxy-visible-colspecs)
The definition of action table.toggle.colspec from the DocBook 4 framework makes use of the pre-defined TogglePseudoClassOperation Author operation.

Here are some examples:

Controlling the visibility of a section using a pseudo-class

You can use a non standard (custom) pseudo-class to impose a style change on a specific element. For instance you can have CSS styles matching the custom pseudo-class access-control-user, like the one below:

section {
  display:none;
}

section:access-control-user {
  display:block;
}

By setting the pseudo-class access-control-user, the element section will become visible by matching the second CSS selector.

Coloring the elements over which the caret was placed

*:caret-visited {  
  color:red;
}

You could create an AuthorCaretListener that sets the caret-visited pseudo-class to the element at the caret location. The effect will be that all the elements traversed by the caret become red.

The API you can use from the caret listener:

ro.sync.ecss.extensions.api.AuthorDocumentController#setPseudoClass(java.lang.String, ro.sync.ecss.extensions.api.node.AuthorElement)
ro.sync.ecss.extensions.api.AuthorDocumentController#removePseudoClass(java.lang.String, ro.sync.ecss.extensions.api.node.AuthorElement)

Pre-defined AuthorOperations can be used directly in your framework ("Author/Actions") to work with custom pseudo classes: