Mike Orth - Booya!

Disable Drag for Certain Items in List

Mike — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 20:13:16 +0000

Drag and drop is easy in Flex when you have basic requirements. Just setup a list with dragEnabled=”true” and you’re up and running. However, what if you need to disable dragging for only a select few items in your list? For example, if you have a list of users and you can only drag a user with a specific role, such as an admin.

The answer is pretty simple, create a custom ItemRenderer and stop the mouseDown event from propagating.

....
private function onMouseDown(event:MouseEvent):void {
if (someCondition == true)
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
}

Spark Label Tooltip

Mike — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:09:56 +0000

While it’s still default for a Label to truncate and show ellipses if the text is too long, it’s no longer default to show a tooltip (as it was in mx). Easy fix for this is the aptly named property:

...

Embedded Fonts with Tooltip and Alert in Flex 4

Mike — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:13:01 +0000

If you’ve embedded a font in a Spark application, you may have noticed that your Alerts and Tooltips are now empty. This is due to the Device 4 font embedding in Flex 4 for Spark components. So any mx controls will not be able to read those fonts. There’s an easy fix for this in css without having to specify a different fontFamily for those controls:

mx|global
{
textFieldClass: ClassReference("mx.core.UIFTETextField");
}

Boom. Problem solved.

[RemoteClass] must specify alias

Mike — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 15:08:23 +0000

Most metadata tags in Flex have default property values. For example, the following are equivalent:

[Embed(source="/path/img.png")]
[Embed("/path/img.png")]

However, when using RemoteClass, even though it only has 1 possible parameter (”alias”), it still requires that you specify the property name as follows:

// Correct:
[RemoteClass(alias="com.myDTO")]

// NOT correct:
[RemoteClass("com.myDTO")]

Monster Debugger

Mike — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 14:52:18 +0000

This is a fantastic external debugger for Flex/Flash applications. The primary thing I love is being able to change properties at run time, and being able to execute methods.

Grab it here, it’s free: Monster Debugger

Slider Increment – snapInterval

Mike — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:03:43 +0000

For future reference, trying to remember what the property name was for the interval or step size for a slider. The property is named “snapInterval”

Targeting the Right Component for Transitions

Mike — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 19:43:27 +0000

When doing any state transitions, you have to be sure to specify the intended target. For instance, recently I was debugging some client code to see why a fade wasn’t working. It turned out that the target was set to the parent group instead of each specific component.

>
fromState="*" toState="*">

target="{[content]}"/>

targets="{[pageOne, pageTwo]}"/>
>
>

id="content">
id="pageOne" includeIn="one"/>
id="pageTwo" includeIn="two"/>
>

In this case, you need to target pageOne and pageTwo, NOT content.

Flex Formatter

Mike — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 21:00:25 +0000

After moving from projects that religiously used FlexFormatter to one that didn’t, I realized just how nice this plugin is. If by chance you haven’t heard of it, FlexFormatter is an eclipse plugin that will format spaces, tabs, declarations, reorder properties & functions, indent, and lots more.

To install, use the update site http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite.

MikeOrthLib updated

Mike — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:55:00 +0000

I added a lot of new custom Flex components to my library, MikeOrthLib. It includes a PagedDataGrid control, some handy popup base classes, and other utility components.

Check out the example application (work in progress).

Visit the project home page.

Increase Memory in Flash Builder / Eclipse for Mac OS

Mike — Fri, 07 May 2010 16:15:39 +0000

If you ever get the eclipse “Out of Memory” error, then you need to increase the default memory size. It’s relatively easy, but you have to know where to look.

In your eclipse install folder, right click on the Eclipse launcher and choose “Show Package Contents”. Then navigate to Contents/MacOS and open eclipse.ini. Change the min & max values to:

-Xms128m
-Xmx512m