Flex 2 Developer's Guide > Customizing the User Interface > Using Styles and Themes > Using local style definitions > Using the Application type selector

Using the Application type selector

The Application container is the top-most container in a Flex application. Styles defined on the Application type selector that are inheritable are inherited by all of the container's children as well as the container's subclasses. Styles that are not inheritable are only applied to the Application container itself and not its children.

Styles applied with the Application type selector are not inherited by the Application object's children if those styles are noninheritable. To use CSS to apply a noninheritable style globally, you can use the global selector. For more information, see Using the global selector.

When you define the styles for the Application type selector, you are not required to declare a style for each component, because the components are children of these classes and inherit the Application type selector styles.

Use the following syntax to define styles for the Application type selector:

<mx:Style>
    Application { style_definition }
</mx:Style>

You can use the Application type selector to set the background image and other display settings that define the way the Flex application appears in a browser. The following sample Application style definition aligns the application file to the left, removes margins, and sets the background image to be empty:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- styles/ApplicationTypeSelector.mxml -->
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
  <mx:Style>
     Application {
        paddingLeft: 0px;
        paddingRight: 0px;
        paddingTop: 0px;
        paddingBottom: 0px;
        horizontalAlign: "left";
        backgroundImage: " "; /* The empty string sets the image to nothing. */
     }
  </mx:Style>
  <mx:Button id="myButton" styleName="myFontStyle" label="Click Here"/>
</mx:Application>

When the background image is set to the empty string, Flex does not draw the default gray gradient.

You can programmatically define values in the Application type selector using the StyleManager class. For more information, see Using the StyleManager class.

Flex 2.01