Flex Component Lifecycle and Flex Component Framework

Flex is component based framework. It has many components like button, datagrid, containers etc. There are times when we want to write our own component when any of standard Flex components doesn’t meet our application needs. There are two ways to achieve this, either create the required custom component by extending exiting Flex standard components else create a component according to our requirements from scratch (completely new component).

Creating a component which can be used as Renderer and Editor

Flex provides a mechanism that we can use a itemRenderer as ItemEditor as well, by setting the rendererIsEditor property of the data Grid, list etc components. We can use any of built-in component
which implement IDropInListItemRenderer interface as ItemRenderer as well as ItemEditor. Suppose if we want to create our custom/ own component which can be used as Itemrenderer and Itemeditor, then we need to work little bit. In this post we are going to create a custom component which can be used as item renderer and item editor.

Flex : Creating Custom Validators

Flex Framework included a very useful component called Validator. The component can be used to validate the data of user input. There are standard validator types of components available like NumberValidator, StringValidator, DataValidator etc. According to the custom needs of application development, the situations arises to develop a custom validator.

Flex Color Chooser Component : Alternate Flex ColorPicker Component

There is standard ColorPicker component in Flex Framework, which displays the colors in grid format. Some time developer needs to provide users to select color with alternate graphical way. That is what i began to develop a component which display the colors in graphical way and let the user select required color clicking on the graphic representation.

Flex UI SnapShot Component

The Bitmap API of the Flex framework is advantageous to implement Bitmap related Flex Applications.  Flash Player utilize the Bitmap API to render the every visual object within SWF as a bitmap (i.e get cached).  Only the Visual Objects which are marked as “dirty” will be redrawn on every frame of  interval. So The amount of resources used to render each frame is significantly reduced.

Flex Resizable Panel Component

The following component extends the Panel class, adds a functionality so that it can resizable.

Flex Minimize Maximize Panel Component

This component extends the Panel class, adds a  button at the title bar of the panel so that when that button clicked, the panel get minimized / maximized depending on its current state.

Flex HTML ToolTip Component

Flex components accepts plain text to display as ToolTip. So there is no way to format the ToolTip text. So i looked into this problem, i checked the source code of the class “ToolTip”. There i got a very easy solution for this.

Flex Image ToolTip Component

Flex has Built-In support to display the ToolTips. The Built-In Options of ToolTip doesn’t support to display the IMAGES in ToolTips. This looks like a restriction to one who wants to show IMAGES in ToolTips along with TEXT. So i have created a Image ToolTip Component, Which allows you to specify any Embedded Image or any Image URL to display an image into ToolTip along with Text below the Image.

Flex Fonts Style List ComboBox Component

The fonts style list as we see in MS word, excel etc, shows the list of fonts name with that respective font Style, which gives the pre-look to the user when applied it to the text. In flex we don’t have such ComboBox which displays the Fonts List with respective Font Styles. So i caught this point at developed a FontStyleList component.