Today I’m releasing a new version of my Tree. Most parts are rewritten for way better performance.

This tree is a replacement for the standard flex tree, which is buggy, slow and not very customizable. With version 2.0, you have full control of the source, so you can tweak it to your needs. It has all the functionalities of the 1.4 version, but some of the stylenames have got another name to match the general stylenames of flex (eg. selectionColor), see the docs for that.
Usage:

<tree:FlpTree
	x="100"
	y="100"
	open="_openCheck(event)"
	close="_openCheck(event)"
	width="250"
	height="400"
	openNodeOnHover="true"
	hoverDelay="150"
	dataProvider="{adata}"
	borderColor="#000000"
	borderStyle="solid"
	borderThickness="1" />

If you find a bug in the source, please leave a comment to let me know!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• The source
• The compiled source (swc)
• The docs

Have fun!

Note: This component is written for Flex 3, it’s not tested on Flex 2 nor Flex 4!

The default flex combobox has keyboard navigation support, but it’s not how you’d expect keyboard support to be. For instance, if you have a list with the following items: ‘aa’, ‘ab’, ‘ba’, and you first press ‘a’, and then ‘b’, a windows combobox would select ‘ab’, whereas the flex combobox selects ‘ba’. This is because the flex combobox only checks the first letter of a list item and handles every keypress as a separate action.
The alternative combobox handles like a windows combobox and selects ‘ab’. Feel free to download and use it in your projects.

Example:

Download: ComboBox.as

I’ve updated the ASDebugger. Not much news here, I only implemented an updated (less buggy) version of the FlpTree. You can download the debugger on the project page.

I’ve been awful quiet on my blog lately, time to do something about it .
First off, I’m releasing version 1.3.0 of my tree component.
I’ve added a filterfunction, which behaves just like a normal filterfunction, but works recursively.
I’ve also fixed some minor bugs, some events weren’t dispatched correctly.
And last but not least, I’ve made the displayobjects in the defaultrenderer protected instead of private, so you can access them more easily when extending the defaultrenderer.

You can download the new swc from the project page, which is here. Also, a link to the docs and an example can be found on the project page

Just fixed the drag & drop bug. It’s now possible to drop between nodes again.

You can download the new swc from the project page, which is here. Also, a link to the docs and an example can be found on the project page

Today I encountered some strange behaviour when using the [ArrayElementType] tag. I had a piece of code which looked like this:

package {
	import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
	[Bindable]
	public class MetaData {
		public var ac:ArrayCollection
		[ArrayElementType("nl.flexperiments.test.TestObject")]
		public var ac2:ArrayCollection;
	}
}

more…

Right, it’s been more than a month now, time to round up this tutorial. If you haven’t read the previous parts, here’s part 1, and here’s part 2.

In this chapter we’re going to fine-tune our component. The basic functionality is in it, but there isn’t really much communication with the outside world going on. We can change that using events, meta-tags, asdoc and we are also going to do some styling. more…

In part two of this tutorial, we’re gonna create the actual component. We left off with a flex library and a folder structure.

If you haven’t read the first part, click here.

Create a new actionscript class and name it after your component. Also, decide wether your class should extend an existing class. In this example it makes sense to extend the textinput class, which will provide the basic functionality. If your component will be part of the interface, you should extend sprite, or any underlying class of sprite. If your component doesn’t have any graphical interface, like a currency converter, you do not need to extend any class. more…

Not too long ago, someone asked me for some tips and tricks to write good components in AS3. Not that I’m the best coder or the most structured person, but when you’ve build some components, you’ll find that you’ll run in the same problems over and over again. Most of the problems you can avoid by starting to write down what your component actually should do. So you first can close flex builder .

For who is this tutorial? Well, I assume you’ve done some coding in AS3, so I won’t explain if-statements and for-loops. Anyone should be able to follow this tutorial, since there won’t be very exotic code in the examples. more…

This week, I had to do some flash work for TFE. As soon as a fired up flash and started programming I realized how lazy you get when programming in eclipse. I mean, auto import, code completion, all kinds of shortcuts… Compared to the flash IDE it’s heaven . Now, I know that there are many IDE’s for flash Actionscript like SePY and FlashDevelop, but none of them really satisfies me like Eclipse does. The only problem with using Eclipse as Actionscript editor is the fact that you cannot build fla files in Flex Builder… or can you? more…