Flex default bgcolor is it a color or an image?

By the docs it’s covered by an image, so its a color. Let me explain what I am getting at, I was reading Ted’s post on preloaders. If you download the source and run the code from a new project in Flex Builder 2 you get a background flicker. The flicker I am talking about is the Blue-ish defualt Flex application color. I was trying to figure out how the default blue-ish color background was showing up. As I didn’t change any code from the downloaded source code.

I found this information in the livedocs.

The Application container’s style uses an image as the default background image. This image obscures any background color settings that you might make. So, to make the value of the bgcolor property display properly, you must clear the Application container’s backgroundImage style property. To do this, you can set it to the value of a space character, as the following example shows:
Application { backgroundImage: ” “; }

No it is talking about the default background color setting being obscured by an image. But what doesn’t make sense is I tried setting the style backgroundImage: ” “; as stated above and it does not do anything.

What I had to do to get rid of the flicker was actually look at the HTML source of Ted’s example and compare to the one generated by my local Flex Builder 2 project. The difference was the “bgcolor” attribute. This attribute is set by the compile through a parameter ${bgcolor} in the index.template.html template. I tried to find the proper way to set some value in the application or the Flex Builder 2 project properties but couldn’t find anything. So to fix the flicker I ended up modifying the index.template.html, changing all ${bgcolor} with #ffffff.

To view it for your self take a look at:
Ted’s example link

Download source in new Flex Builder project link

You’ll see the bgcolor=”#ffffff” in Ted’s html and bgcolor=”#869ca7″.

11 comments July 22nd, 2006