Actionscript Cookbook

11.24. Customizing a Component’s Appearance

Problem

You want to customize the appearance of an instance of a UI component.

Solution

Use the setStyleProperty( ) method to set the colors for each of the style properties or use a FStyleFormat object to apply changes to more than one component at a time.

Discussion

You can change the appearance of all Flash UI components using the globalStyleFormat object, as detailed in Recipe 11.25. You can also modify the artwork in the Skins folders in the Library to change all instances of a particular type of component. However, you can also modify the appearance of each instance individually using the setStyleProperty( ) method. The advantage of this technique is, of course, that you can modify each instance without affecting all other instances.

Each Flash UI component instance has the following style properties:

arrow

Color of the arrow in the scrollbar and combo boxes

background

Color of the background when the component is active

backgroundDisabled

Color of the background when the component is disabled (dimmed)

check

Color of the checkbox’s check

darkshadow

Color of the darkened inner shadow for a border

embedFonts

Whether or not to embed fonts for text

face

The main color of a component

focusRectInner

Color of inner focus rectangle

focusRectOuter

Color of outer focus rectangle

foregroundDisabled

Color of a component’s foreground when in a disabled state

highlight

Color of the inner portion of the highlight

highlight3D

Color of the outer portion ...