ColdFusion provides the following methods for controlling the style and appearance of Flash forms and their elements:

Skins: provide a simple method for controlling the overall appearance of your form. A single skin controls the entire form.

Styles: provide a finer-grained level of control than skins. Each style specifies a particular characteristic for a single control. Many styles are also inherited by a control's children.

You can use both techniques in combination: you can specify a skin for your form and use styles to specify the appearance (such as input text font) of individual controls.

The following sections describe these methods and how you can use them. For detailed information on the style names and values that you can use, see "ColdFusion Flash Form Style Reference" in the CFML Reference.

Controlling form appearance with Flash skins

The cfform tag takes a skin attribute, which lets you select an overall appearance for your form. The skin determines the color used for highlighted and selected elements.

You can select the following Flash skins:

• haloBlue
• haloGreen (the default)
• haloOrange
• haloSilver

About Flash form styles

The ColdFusion Flash form tags have a style attribute that lets you specify control characteristics using CSS syntax. You can specify a style attribute in the following tags:

• cfform
• cfformgroup
• cfcalendar
• cfformitem, types hrule and vrule
• cfgrid
• cfinput
• cfselect
• cftextarea
• cftree

The attributes for the cfform and cfformgroup generally apply to all the form or form group's children.

Flash supports many, but not all, standard CSS styles. ColdFusion Flash forms only support applying specific CSS style specifications to individual CFML tags and their corresponding Flash controls and groups. You cannot use an external style sheet or define a document-level style sheet, as you can for HTML format forms.