How do I set background to specific GtkCombo and its children?

[SyntevoAlex (Alexander Miloslavskiy)]

What is the best way to set background to a specific Combo and all its children, without affecting other Combos?

I’m working on a cross-platform window library called SWT. In it, there’s an API to set back/fore colors to various widgets.

We have a problem with composite widgets, such as Combo, because it has many parts: menu, drop button, cell, entry, etc.

The intuitive way to set background would be to

1. Compose CSS like * {background: #414141}
2. Allocate CSS provider with gtk_css_provider_new()
3. Apply it to widget with gtk_style_context_add_provider()

However, this doesn’t work with Combo: it only sets background to the Combo itself.

The current workaround is to find all internal widgets and apply changes to them as well.
This has multiple problems:

1. The code is hackish and reaches into non-public parts of GTK
2. As a result, we sometimes need to adjust the searching magic
3. The code has to detect changes in internal widgets, such as when ‘appears-as-list’ style causes Combo to create a different set of internal widgets.

The other potential solutions I investigated:

1. gtk_style_context_add_provider_for_screen() - supposedly this can be used with IDs to only affect specific widgets. However, this doesn’t sound like a good approach for a window library. In a typical case, there are numerous widgets and everything gets styled (imagine app-driven “dark theme”). We will therefore need to compile massive CSS, which is going to be a performance issue in my understanding. Also, managing this massive CSS is going to be another problem.
2. !important keyword like in web-based CSS - I understand that GTK does not support that.
3. gtk_style_context_set_parent() - I understand that in Combo, every internal widget already refers to parent style context. Just it still doesn’t help. Not sure why, I expect something along the lines of specificity of default CSS rules overriding our CSS.