Properties vs. Styles for Setting Visual Appearance of Controls?

Question

I'm a bit confused by what seems to be a schizophrenic approach to properties and styles within the Flex 4 SDK. In some cases, components have properties that affect their visual appearance while in other cases they use styles. For example, here is a BorderContainer from an example in Adobe's Using Flex 4 docs:
<s:BorderContainer width="200" height="200"
                                   borderColor="0x000000"
                                  borderAlpha="1"
                                   cornerRadius="10"
                                   borderWeight="1">
borderColor, borderAlpha, cornerRadius and borderWeight are all styles. However, BorderContainer also has some properties for visual formatting; e.g.,: backgroundFill and borderStroke. The latter property equates to two of the styles: borderColor and borderWeight. But the former, backgroundFill, doesn't appear to have a corresponding style although there is a backgroundImage style.
So, I'm wondering why the SDK has this split personality. But more to the point, I'm wondering if there's some logical explanation. How do I know when to use a style rather than a property? Where should developers look first when seeking to modify the visual appearance of a control?
David Salahi

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply.
I am particular interested in column widths and the internal padding/margin of a cell. This is for a report which contains a table inside another table (using a tree, but with the sub-table in a column, rather than the detail facet).
By default, each sub-table is formatted with different column widths, which makes them hard to compare. If I can specify that explicitly, they all line up nicely. (Something weird also happens when a sub-table contains no data, since I'm not sure the cell with the message 'No rows yet' follows the same rules.)
(Specifying the internal margin is useful for removing the border between the sub-table and its surroundings)