I am using a ColorPicker control in Flex 3.6 project, and I want to customize it like this:
Basically removing the border from the ColorPicker selector button and reducing the gap size between the selector and swatch pallete to zero.
Is that possible at all?
I've searched all the attributes and styles of the ColorPicker w/o success...
Many thanks!
Ofer
You can customize components like this one by using the mx_internal namespace. Add the below to your imports:
import mx.core.mx_internal;
use namespace mx_internal;
Now you can access parts of the component you couldn't before. For instance, I needed to add a "Preferences" button to the ColorPicker's SwatchPanel in the empty space to the right.
I created a custom component that extended ColorPicker and added an EventListener for DropdownEvent.OPEN. In the event handler method, I got the SwatchPanel like this:
var swatchPanel:SwatchPanel = this.mx_internal::dropdown;
I then used swatchPanel.addChildAt(...) to add my preferences button. Easy!
You should be able to do something similar by overriding the createChildren method and messing with either its children or mx_internal properties.
Related
I am writing a class that extends mx.core.UIComponent. In the constructor of this class, I would like to add a Button (spark.components.Button). However, creating a new Button object (such as var b:Button = new Button();) and then doing this.addChild(b) doesn't work -- no button is appearing. Is there any reason why a Button object can't be added as a child?
Edit: Just to add, when I print out the children, it says that the Button object is a child, but the Button doesn't show up.
You need to add the button in the createChildren method not in the constructor.
protected var button:Button;
override protected function createChildren():void {
super.createChildren();
button = new Button();
addChild(button);
}
Depending on what you are trying to do you may also need to implement the measure and updateDisplayList methods.
Using UIComponent directly, you aren't getting the layout of the child handled for you; you would need to set the position and size of your child components manually (see docs).
Consider using a Group (or Canvas, if you're still on MX components) to handle child layout. You can still add rendering in updateDisplayList, just make sure you call super.updateDisplayList() as well.
You need to read up on the differences between ActionScript components and Flex components. When using a Flex component, you must use container.addElement( element ), not container.addChild( child ). As far as I am aware, the only classes with this functionality descend from Group (at least in the Spark framework, the one I am most familiar with). So extending UIComponent will not allow you to add a Button, although a UIComponent can be added to a Flex container (which I do not believe a normal Sprite can do)
I have a JTable that I would like to display a fancy tooltip (basically a JTextArea) for particular cells in a column. I am using a custom cell renderer, so it would be easy if I could figure out how to popup a window when I hover over the cell renderer's component.
Are there any examples of how to do this?
You can use HTML in tooltips, if you use the <html> and </html> tags around the content.
Use HTML to format the tooltip. Using colored (<font>) and multi-line (<br>) tooltips is now easy.
Creating and overwriting the default JToolTip is a bit harder. Every component has a JToolTip instance and you can retrieve this one with JComponent.createToolTip(). To create a custom tooltip, extend the cell renderer and override it's createToolTip to implement your custom functionality (return a custom extended version of JToolTip).
I'm not sure I totally am clear on what sort of customizations specifically you're hoping to do, so I'll be general here.
There is a class, UIManager, that controls the look and feel of components, including the swing ToolTip class. The simple way to make an easy change is to call a method in UIManager to set properties for the tooltips. Doing this you could do things like use BorderFactory to add a decorative border, or change the background color, etc.
Here are some examples of changing some of these properties:
UIManager.put("ToolTip.background", new ColorUIResource(255, 247, 200)); // The color is #fff7c8.
Border border = BorderFactory.createLineBorder(new Color(76,79,83)); // The color is #4c4f53.
UIManager.put("ToolTip.border", border);
ToolTipManager.sharedInstance().setDismissDelay(15000);// 15 seconds
If you want to change a whole bunch of things about their look and feel, it is better to extend your current look and feel with a class implementing custom tooltip look and feel. A full example of this can be found in this blog post by a former Sun developer.
You might also have a look at this Stack Overflow question on how to set the insets on a tooltip.
Hopefully a quick question here. I have setup a "LayoutPage" custom class (based on MovieClip) and I am attemptimg to create a "selected" behaviour.
When I assign my "addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK,toggleSelection)" from within my custom class, everything works as expected, clicking any object of that class does display the correct behaviour.
Now, I would like to extend the functionality by adding keyboard modifyer to either extend the selection or replace it.
For this, I thought of moving the "addEventListener" out of the class and put it inside the parent instead (my "PageLayout" class where all the "LayoutPage" live). But by doing so, the click event no longer register on the "LayoutPage" class but rather on its individual children (Page icon, Page number text field, Page Highlight shape, etc.)
Can anybody explain why this is happening and how I can circumvent it?
TIA
This should be happening no matter where you put your addEventListener. It is because mouseChildren is switched on by default. It is probably best to turn it off inside your LayoutPage class like so:
myLayoutPage.mouseChildren = false;
The actual issue is that use are probably using currentTarget to reference the item that was clicked on in your event handler method. Take a look at the descriptions for currentTarget and target to get a good idea of how they differ.
A good option would be to add your listener at the PageLayout level, but add it specifically to each LayoutPage child like so:
myLayoutPage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, toggleSelection);
This way you can just use target in your handlers. But it would probably be best to still switch mouseChildren to false on each of your LayoutPage instances.
I'd like to conditionally hide a tab in a TabNavigator. It seems that setting visible doesn't work properly (presumably because this is how the TabNavigator hides the tabs that aren't currently selected).
What's the right way to do this?
You can do this by making use of TabNavigator's getTabAt() method which returns the Button that makes up the visual tab. You can then set that Button's visible property. It's a little tricky to get this setup with a bindings, but it's doable.
You could also consider just disabling the tab instead, which you can do by setting enabled on the corresponding TabNavigator child (for which visible didn't work).
What do you mean by hide? If you actually mean remove, then just take your array that's bound to the data in the TabNavigator, and remove the applicable element from it.
If you want to just have them removed temporarily, create a component of your own that encapsulates the TabNavigator and has an array of removed tabs and an array of actual tabs. Then handle this as you see fit.
You might want to check out the flexlib project. They have a component called SuperTabNavigator that adds a lot of functionality to the base Flex TabNavigator, including hiding tabs (I think).
If you do have to create your own component, though, it's a bit more tricky. The thing to know is that "tabs" are actually specially styled buttons, contained within a TabBar component (the TabBar is then contained within the TabNavigator). What you'll have to do then, is subclass TabNavigator and have some property on your views (i.e. the canvases, etc. that are added to the TabNavigator) that is bound to the visible and includeInLayout properties of the TabBar buttons.
In essence, what you'll have is something like:
BindingUtils.bindProperty( tabButton, "visible", view, "someProperty" );
BindingUtils.bindProperty( tabButton, "includeInLayout", view, "someProperty" );
I don't know about TabNavigator, but in other containers, you can set the includeInLayout property to false and it will be ignored. You probably still need to combine it with visible.
var secondTab = tabNavigator.removeChildAt(0);
I inherited a custom component from TextField. The component needs to know when any of its styles got changed at runtime via setStyle. How would I do that? It's probably obvious but I couldn't find an event or appropriate method to override.
If you want the text field to play nicely with containers and other components in Flex you may want to wrap it in a UIComponent, or have the subclass implement the IUIComponent and IStyleClient or ISimpleStyleClient interfaces (which UIComponent implements). If you do the component will work with Flex' style system and every time a style changes a method calledstyleChanged` will be called:
public function styleChanged(styleProp:String):void
See http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/mx/core/UIComponent.html#styleChanged()
styleChanged () method
public function styleChanged(styleProp:String):void
Detects changes to style properties. When any style property is set, Flex calls the styleChanged() method, passing to it the name of the style being set.
This is an advanced method that you might override when creating a subclass of UIComponent. When you create a custom component, you can override the styleChanged() method to check the style name passed to it, and handle the change accordingly. This lets you override the default behavior of an existing style, or add your own custom style properties.
If you handle the style property, your override of the styleChanged() method should call the invalidateDisplayList() method to cause Flex to execute the component's updateDisplayList() method at the next screen update.
Parameters styleProp:String — The name of the style property, or null if all styles for this component have changed.