How to change width of TAB character in a Flex TextArea? - apache-flex

Is it possible to change the width of an insert TAB character in a Flex TextArea?
I'm capturing FocusEvent.KEY_FOCUS_CHANGE events and manually inserting a "\t" into a text area styled with an embedded monospace font. By default, the TABs are being displayed two and a half monospace characters wide... I need them to display five monospace characters wide.
Any ideas on how to do this?

What about something like this?
<mx:Canvas>
<mx:Script>
[Bindable]
public var myText:String;
</mx:Script>
<mx:TextArea id="textArea" text="{TabUtil.expand(myText)}" valueCommit="myText = TabUtil.contract(myText))" />
</mx:Canvas>
public class TabUtil
{
public static const SPACE:String = " "; // Five spaces;
public static function expand(text:String):String
{
return text.replace("\t",SPACE);
}
public static function contract(text:String):String
{
return text.replace(SPACE,"\t");
}
}
I forget the params of replace, but I think it may take a RegEx, in which case you'd need to tweak the above. But it should work.

The tabStops property of textFormat is what you are looking for. You can set the pixel values of where you want each tab to be placed.
var tf:TextFormat = new TextFormat();
tf.tabStops = [100, 200, 300, 400];
myTextArea.mx_internal::getTextField().defaultTextFormat = tf;

Related

Scroll inside an item renderer result in an empty item

I'm developing a mobile app. I have a view with an horizontal list, each item has a long description so I would need a vertical scroll for that independent information. I'm trying to add an scroll as a Child of an itemRenderer. And I dont get it. Anyone knows what I'm doing bad?
I have a class with inheritance of ItemRenderer (I tried BaseRenderer from AsFusion too, that it seems to have more performance for mobile apps, with the same result).
And here is the part of the scroll from my code:
override protected function createChildren():void
{
super.createChildren();
scroller = new VScrollBar();
scroller.percentHeight = 100;
scroller.setStyle('right', 0);
scrollGroup = new Group();
scrollGroup.percentHeight = 100;
scrollGroup.percentWidth = 100;
super.addElement(scroller);
super.addElement(scrollGroup);
scroller.viewport = scrollGroup;
}
I also tried
override protected function createChildren():void
{
super.createChildren();
scroller = new Scroller();
scroller.percentHeight = 100;
scroller.percentWidth = 100;
scrollGroup = new Group();
scrollGroup.percentHeight = 100;
scrollGroup.percentWidth = 100;
super.addElement(scroller);
super.addElement(scrollGroup);
scroller.viewport = scrollGroup;
}
And the result is the same. An empty item in the list. I can change page (pagesnapping of the list horizontal scroll) and the next item is also empty. If I delete addElement(scroller) I can see the items perfectly, but without the vertical scroll that I really need. So the problem is in the scroller. Any idea what I'm doing so bad?? Please? I need the solution in actionscript, I have more itemrenderers done and I will make inheritance, and the performance for the mobile is better in actionscript. Thank you in advance.
I've never used scroll bars in an item renderer... But you might check out the Scroller component? Something like this:
<s:ItemRenderer>
<s:Scroller width="100%" height="100%">
<s:Group>
<Your_components_here />
</s:Group>
</s:Scroller>
</s:ItemRenderer>
Not sure if it would behave any different though.
In order to work, scrolls need an actual width and height. It seems that the groups you're passing are actually empty, although they do have a set percentWidth. Add content into them.
If you're scrolling text, it might be more viable to use the built in scroll of the TextArea.
I solved, with the guidance of Grigorash Vasilij I noticed that the content of the scroller was not showing because in the group the content size was 0 and private visible variable was false. So the percent sizes of the scroller was not working, I updated it in the method updateDisplayList.
override protected function updateDisplayList( unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number ):void
{
super.updateDisplayList( unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight );
scroller.width = unscaledWidth;
scroller.height = unscaledHeight;
...
}
After that, the scroller was horizontal, then the horizontal scroll wasn't work, I wanted a verticalScroll if needed in the item Renderer, so after the constructor of Scroller I set the horizontalPolicy of the scroll equal to off. The result is the next:
override protected function createChildren():void
{
super.createChildren();
scroller = new Scroller();
scroller.percentHeight = 100;
scroller.percentWidth = 100;
scroller.setStyle("horizontalScrollPolicy", "off");
scrollGroup = new Group();
scrollGroup.percentHeight = 100;
scrollGroup.percentWidth = 100;
addChild(scrollGroup);
scroller.viewport = scrollGroup;
addChild(scroller);
}
My class is inheriting of BaseRenderer from Asfusion If you inherit of itemrenderer use addElement instead of addChild.

Trying to draw a Rectangle to a Custom Container in Flex4/AS3

So below is the code I have so far. For now I simply want to make it draw a square and have it show up. Right now when I click the area defined in MXML as <components:PaintArea width="100%" height="100%" id="paint-a"></PaintArea> it shows nothing; however, the actionlistener is getting triggered and an element is being added to the group. Not sure exactly what is going on... perhaps for some reason it doesn't think the element is drawable? Anyways thanks for the help!
public class PaintArea extends SkinnableContainer
{
private var canvas:Group;
public function PaintArea()
{
super();
canvas = new Group();
canvas.clipAndEnableScrolling = true;
canvas.percentHeight = 100;
canvas.percentWidth = 100;
canvas.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP,drawRectangle);
this.addElement(canvas);
}
private function drawRectangle(e:MouseEvent):void{
var r:Rect = new Rect();
r.fill = new SolidColor(0x00ff00,.5);
canvas.addElement(r);
}
}
You should probably set the width and height of the rectangle r.
You could also use a BorderContainer (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/spark/components/BorderContainer.html) - its a SkinnableContainer with a styleable border and fill

Actionscript flex: Converting # colors to uint

I'm working with several components that take color as a uint, but the colors I have are in the format of "#161616". I'm not sure what the relation between the 2 types of colors are or how to go from one to another.
It doesn't have to be an actionscript solution. I have only a small number of these colors, so can be done manually too.
var color:uint = 0x161616;
Or, to convert them programmatically:
var s:String = "#161616";
var color:uint = uint("0x" + s.substr(1));
Be aware that stylesheets in Flex want the color values in the form #FFFFFF ... NOT 0xFFFFFF. MXML element style properties don't care. Although when you start writing something like:
<mx:VBox backgroundColor="
the Intellisense prompts you for a uint value; if you go ahead and complete it like so
<mx:VBox backgroundColor="#FFFFFF"></VBox>
it will still make your backgroundColor the same as if you had written
<mx:VBox backgroundColor="0xFFFFFF"></VBox>
Here you are 2 of my utils functions:
public static function convertUintToString( color:uint ):String {
return color.toString(16);
}
public static function convertStringToUint(value:String, mask:String):uint {
var colorString:String = "0x" + value;
var colorUint:uint = mx.core.Singleton.getInstance("mx.styles::IStyleManager2").getColorName( colorString );
return colorUint;
}
the correct way is by using StyleManager.getColorName()
see the full documentation
var i : uint = uint("0x161616");

Is there a multiline text workaround for Flex

Is there a workaround for displaying multiline text in Flex 3? The two controls I have tried so far are mx:Text, and mx:TextArea. Each control has its own bug associated with it. For reference: mx:Text bug - http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-9819 mx:TextArea bug - http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12616. Basically, neither control handles scrolling correctly if you do not specify a height and the text wraps onto the next line (height is determined dynamically by Flex, based on the wrapping). Does anybody have a workaround that might be helpful?
Thanks.
Update: One of the methods I have tried in the past has been to manually calculate the height of a mx:Text element. I can do this by using the following:
var textItem:Text = new Text();
var len:int = value.length;
var lines:int = int(len/115) + 1;
var height:int = lines * 20;
textItem.height = height;
While this seems to get around the problem in mx:Text, there is one big fault. The calculation relies heavily on font-size, letter-spacing, and the width of textItem. I can use this method, and move on with my project. However, maintenance on this is inevitable, and with code like this, it will a gigantic PITA.
I've had to deal with this a few times myself. The best way I've found to get dynamic height sizing of <mx:Text> is to leave the height out of the text and then specify a percent height of 100% on the enclosing VBox, HBox, etc. Something like the following should work for you:
<mx:VBox width="100%" height="100%">
<mx:Text text="Your really long text goes here." width="100%"/>
</mx:VBox>
As this is a bit of a hack itself, your milage may vary.
Edit
If you want to extend your above example so that maintenance on the code is easier, you should look into the TextLineMetrics class. This will allow you to measure the width and height of your text, taking into account font, size, etc. The docs for TextLineMetrics can be found here. To use your above example, you'd want to do something like the following:
var textItem:Text = new Text();
var metrics:TextLineMetrics = textItem.measureText( value );
var len:int = metrics.width;
var lines:int = int(len/textItem.width) + 1;
var height:int = lines * metrics.height;
textItem.height = height;
I use a variable height text area class that works very well for me:
package
{
import mx.controls.TextArea;
/**
* TextArea that xpands to the height of the content contained
* within.
* #author joel
*
*/
public class VariableHeightTextArea extends TextArea
{
public function VariableHeightTextArea()
{
super();
}
override protected function updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number) : void
{
super.updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);
if(this.height != int(this.textField.measuredHeight) + 5 )
{
this.height = this.textField.measuredHeight + 5;
}
}
}
}

Flex: Custom Item Renderer For Combobox controls truncates text

I've implemented a custom item renderer that I'm using with a combobox on a flex project I'm working on. It displays and icon and some text for each item. The only problem is that when the text is long the width of the menu is not being adjusted properly and the text is being truncated when displayed. I've tried tweaking all of the obvious properties to alleviate this problem but have not had any success. Does anyone know how to make the combobox menu width scale appropriately to whatever data it's rendering?
My custom item renderer implementation is:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:HBox xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
styleName="plain" horizontalScrollPolicy="off">
<mx:Image source="{data.icon}" />
<mx:Label text="{data.label}" fontSize="11" fontWeight="bold" truncateToFit="false"/>
</mx:HBox>
And my combobox uses it like so:
<mx:ComboBox id="quicklinksMenu" change="quicklinkHandler(quicklinksMenu.selectedItem.data);" click="event.stopImmediatePropagation();" itemRenderer="renderers.QuickLinkItemRenderer" width="100%"/>
EDIT:
I should clarify on thing: I can set the dropdownWidth property on the combobox to some arbitrarily large value - this will make everything fit, but it will be too wide. Since the data being displayed in this combobox is generic, I want it to automatically size itself to the largest element in the dataprovider (the flex documentation says it will do this, but I have the feeling my custom item renderer is somehow breaking that behavior)
Just a random thought (no clue if this will help):
Try setting the parent HBox and the Label's widths to 100%. That's generally fixed any problems I've run into that were similar.
Have you tried using the calculatePreferredSizeFromData() method?
protected override function calculatePreferredSizeFromData(count:int):Object
This answer is probably too late, but I had a very similar problem with the DataGrid's column widths.
After much noodling, I decided to pre-render my text in a private TextField, get the width of the rendered text from that, and explicitly set the width of the column on all of the appropriate resize type events. A little hack-y but works well enough if you haven't got a lot of changing data.
You would need to do two things:
for the text, use mx.controls.Text (that supports text wrapping) instead of mx.controls.Label
set comboBox's dropdownFactory.variableRowHeight=true -- this dropdownFactory is normally a subclass of List, and the itemRenderer you are setting on ComboBox is what will be used to render each item in the list
And, do not explicitly set comboBox.dropdownWidth -- let the default value of comboBox.width be used as dropdown width.
If you look at the measure method of mx.controls.ComboBase, you'll see that the the comboBox calculates it's measuredMinWidth as a sum of the width of the text and the width of the comboBox button.
// Text fields have 4 pixels of white space added to each side
// by the player, so fudge this amount.
// If we don't have any data, measure a single space char for defaults
if (collection && collection.length > 0)
{
var prefSize:Object = calculatePreferredSizeFromData(collection.length);
var bm:EdgeMetrics = borderMetrics;
var textWidth:Number = prefSize.width + bm.left + bm.right + 8;
var textHeight:Number = prefSize.height + bm.top + bm.bottom
+ UITextField.TEXT_HEIGHT_PADDING;
measuredMinWidth = measuredWidth = textWidth + buttonWidth;
measuredMinHeight = measuredHeight = Math.max(textHeight, buttonHeight);
}
The calculatePreferredSizeFromData method mentioned by #defmeta (implemented in mx.controls.ComboBox) assumes that the data renderer is just a text field, and uses flash.text.lineMetrics to calculate the text width from label field in the data object. If you want to add an additional visual element to the item renderer and have the ComboBox take it's size into account when calculating it's own size, you will have to extend the mx.controls.ComboBox class and override the calculatePreferredSizeFromData method like so:
override protected function calculatePreferredSizeFromData(count:int):Object
{
var prefSize:Object = super.calculatePrefferedSizeFromData(count);
var maxW:Number = 0;
var maxH:Number = 0;
var bookmark:CursorBookmark = iterator ? iterator.bookmark : null;
var more:Boolean = iterator != null;
for ( var i:int = 0 ; i < count ; i++)
{
var data:Object;
if (more) data = iterator ? iterator.current : null;
else data = null;
if(data)
{
var imgH:Number;
var imgW:Number;
//calculate the image height and width using the data object here
maxH = Math.max(maxH, prefSize.height + imgH);
maxW = Math.max(maxW, prefSize.width + imgW);
}
if(iterator) iterator.moveNext();
}
if(iterator) iterator.seek(bookmark, 0);
return {width: maxW, height: maxH};
}
If possible store the image dimensions in the data object and use those values as imgH and imgW, that will make sizing much easier.
EDIT:
If you are adding elements to the render besides an image, like a label, you will also have to calculate their size as well when you iterate through the data elements and take those dimensions into account when calculating maxH and maxW.

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