Flex Monkey Patches

I just published a new “Monkey Indexed Page” (see here if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The page is a collection of good resources on tooltips.

Here is the main Monkey Index page.

Here is the tooltip page.

I think once I reach around 5 pages, I will create a new feed just for the Monkey Index, so I don’t have to post new blog entries just to announce a new page…but until then…oh well.

-Kyle

Earlier this week I was helping a customer trouble shoot a webservice crossdomain.xml issue.
I pointed him to a blog post I published a while ago as a reference on how to code webservice stuff in actionscript instead of mxml:

http://flexmonkeypatches.com/flex-webservice-with-auto-repeat-and-increasing-timeout/

I was a little embarrassed to find that my sample didn’t work anymore.
The code was fine and the app worked when the swf was run from Flex Builder (thus avoiding sandbox security issues). I hate saying “do as I say and not as I do”, so I decided to took a closer look.

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A while back I was looking for a canned media player widget for a Flex/AIR app I was fooling with and found this pretty cool dev center sample: Flex 3 Media Widget (the previous incarnation of this was available on labs here)

What made it even cooler were the source files it had for dealing with RSS and MediaRSS feeds.

I was starting to work on a new sample that needed to read RSS and remembered the aforementioned project, but couldn’t remember where I had gotten the RSS libraries from. I figured I would write this blog entry, so next time it will be easier for me to remember.

You can view the source of the app here:
http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/devnet/mediawidget/srcview/
and download a zip here: http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/devnet/mediawidget/srcview/MediaWidget.zip

There is an AS3 library at: http://code.google.com/p/as3syndicationlib/, but I believe the code with the MediaWidget is newer, plus it contains MediaRSS parsing classes. Woot!

Here is another week’s worth of great links:

Here is a simple sample demonstrating how to achieve a “reverse transition” when using states.

The key is actually setting the target or targets array for the sequence or parallel transition.
Although from the Flex 2 docs, the following are good resources (and in fact the setting of the targets is pointed out in the comments on the docs in the first link:)

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00000103.html
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/201/html/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Book_Parts&file=transitions_080_03.html

Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

Browse the source of this example.

Or continue into the blog entry to see the source:
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I have a few samples I am working on to demonstrate how to do some “drag selection” and I thought some of the base code I use in these samples would be good to post on its own.

So here it is. Pretty basic, but it will serve as the basis for a few samples that I should have out next week (hopefully).

Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

Browse the source of this example.

Or continue into the blog entry to see the source:
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I recently had a request to help show an approach for creating a custom “speech bubble” tooltip.

Here is a sample that should help demonstrate the approach.

There are docs on creating custom tooltips and that is essentially what my sample is based upon:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=tooltips_1.html

The next challenge was to customize the border. I mimicked what was described in the docs:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=tooltips_1.html
The docs show you how to customize the tooltip border, but since my custom tooltip extends Panel instead, I need to use the skin for the Panel border.
(thus I am using mx.skins.PanelSkin) It is also useful to look at what the parent of that class is doing (mx.skins.halo.HaloBorder).

I basically stole the “tail drawing” bit from the tooltip skin though and just patched it on to the end of the drawBorder method in the PanelSkin.
You may want to make this more robust, but this is just the general approach. (Add logic to determine what side to draw the tail on, what color the tail should be, etc.)

Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

Browse the source of this example.

Or continue into the blog entry to see the source:
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Here is another week’s worth of great links:

This really isn’t that difficult to do, but the docs regarding it are a little hard to find. I thought I’d post the link and then some links to other useful blog entries that have info to add on this topic.

Doc link: http://livedocs.adobe.com/blazeds/1/blazeds_devguide/help.html?content=runtimeconfig_5.html#194376

One of Adobe’s platform evangelists has posted a blog entry that may be more clear:
http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com/2008/06/05/endpointatruntime/

There is also a “Flex cookbook” entry that may be of some use:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails&productId=2&postId=9703

Here is the second approach to solving the problem I descibed in this post:

http://blog.flexmonkeypatches.com/2008/09/02/flex-datechooser-background-color-for-smtwtfs-header-solution-1/

Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

Browse the source of this example.

Or continue into the blog entry to see the source:
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