Actionscript Cookbook

11.25. Customizing All Components’ Appearances

Problem

You want to apply global style changes to all Flash UI Component instances.

Solution

Use the globalStyleFormat object. Assign values to the style properties you want to modify and then call the applyChanges( ) method.

Discussion

You can learn how to modify the style property settings for individual component instances in Recipe 11.24. This can be a useful technique when you want to adjust the appearance of each instance separately. However, to apply the same style changes to all instances of all UI components, you should use the globalStyleFormat object.

The globalStyleFormat object is available in your Flash movie whenever you have added at least one UI component to your movie. The globalStyleFormat object has properties corresponding to the same style properties listed in Recipe 11.24, but the values for the globalStyleFormat object apply to all instances of UI components instead of just one.

To apply changes to the global styles, you should set the values of the corresponding properties on the globalStyleFormat object itself. You can access the properties using dot notation:

// Apply a new value to the global face property.
globalStyleFormat.face = 0x97DE50;

Once you have changed a value, you need to tell Flash to update the view by calling the applyChanges( ) method from the globalStyleFormat object, as follows:

globalStyleFormat.applyChanges(  );

You can change more than one property before applying changes. For example:

globalStyleFormat.face ...