Recipe 9.1. Creating an Outline Around a Text Field

Problem

You want to place a border around a text field.

Solution

Set the text field's border property to true. Additionally, you can change the color of the border by setting the object's borderColor property.

Discussion

By default, a text field does not have a visible border, which is assumed to be the most common preferred behavior. For example, you may not want a border around an item label. However, there are many cases in which you will want to apply a border to a text field, such as a field that requires some user input. The border shows the user where to click to input a value. Simply setting a text field's border property to true turns on the border around the object:

field.border = true;

To turn off the border, simply set the border property to false.

The default border color is black, but that can be changed with the borderColor property, which accepts a hex RGB value corresponding to the desired color:

field.borderColor = 0xFF00FF;  // Make the border violet.