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Building Flash clients for Web Services with Soap and Flash MX
Author: Jeffrey F. Hill | Website: http://www.flash-db.com/services/ |

Adding some Style to our components

Wow - those components sure are ugly. We'll where going to fix that up right now. We are going to use the FStyleFormat associated with each component to change the look of all of our components at once. This is really similar to using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in HTML. Here is what the code for changing the Style of all of our components looks like:

// Create a new Format - that we can apply to multiple objects/components later.
formStyleFormat 			= new FStyleFormat;
 formStyleFormat.scrollTrack 	= "0x000099";
 formStyleFormat.highlight   	= "0xffffff";
 formStyleFormat.highlight3D 	= "0x000033";
 formStyleFormat.arrow 		= "0xffffff";
 formStyleFormat.face 		= "0x0066FF";
 formStyleFormat.background  	= "0x0066FF";
 formStyleFormat.shadow		= "0x000099";
 formStyleFormat.darkshadow		= "0x000033";
 formStyleFormat.selection		= "0x000033";
 formStyleFormat.textColor		= "0x000066";
 formStyleFormat.textBold		= false;
// Add a listener to each one and Apply the Changes to the Components.
formStyleFormat.addListener(ScrollBarTop, ScrollBarBottom, comboBox, submit);
formStyleFormat.applyChanges();

What this is doing is setting up a standard Style and applying it to all the components. This makes things easy because you can copy and paste a style/format you come up with into any other movie you want - and the components will be formatted the same.

Formatting the text fields: We can do a lot more with text fields now that they have an instance name - and it doesn't really matter what properties we actually specified for the text field when creating them - as long as they are defined as such:

// Set up individual Text Area's (Input).
Input.multiline 				= true;
Input.wordWrap 				= true;
Input.type 				= "input";
Input.background 				= true;
Input.backgroundColor  			= "0x000099";
Input.border 				= true;
Input.borderColor		    		= "0x003300";
Input.html 				= false;
Input.textColor				= "0xffffff";

We can reference all of the text fields properties as above - as long as they have an instance name associated with them. We also change the properties of the 'Output' text field in about the same way - with the main exception being that we set the .html property to 'true'.

One last part to mention is setting the text on the push button, this is done with the code:

submit.setLabel("Translate Now!");

And that's about it for the Style's part of our form. All of the Formatting and Style's ActionScript is located in a layer called 'Styles' in the main flash movie. It's best to keep all of the style and formatting code on one layer so it's easier to find later on. Now we've only got one more component to work with and that's the combo Box which will list all of the available translation modes. So here goes:

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