CodeStore.net comments on "Flex App Basics 8: Display Column Values As Icons"

Reply from Jake Howlett

Jake Howlett — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:39:30 -0600

I noticed that too Jerry. If in any doubt I check a property like this:

if (object && object.property=='foo'){

Glad you like the series of articles. There was me thinking they're a bit unhinged and following no real pattern or progression - just random bits of detail from a bigger picture.

Planning on releasing the code on Monday, so will probably bring the "Flex App Basics" posts to an end.

Reply from Jerry Carter

Jerry Carter — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:25:01 -0600

Good call Jake. I believe you are correct as we are dealing with Renderers, they only become active when rendered. Interestingly with Flex, this seems to affect the availability of properties as well. For example - try making a control invisible and then access it's properties. Nada... at least in my experience. It's like Flex demartials the object instance when it is not actively being rendered. This might be part of the memory management to keep the flash player running smoothly.

Nice touch, too. I think you're making this easy for a lot of people. With all the articles you're putting together (spoon fed even!) there should be no excuse for any competent developer to not use Flex where it is a good fit. I imagine vast numbers of developers around the world making careers from your teachings. Shouldn't we be calling you Dr. Jake then? ;-)

Reply from Jake Howlett

Jake Howlett — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:36:14 -0600

You should recognise the paper clip icon as a Silk one then ;o)

Not sure what your "but" is? My approach here is that the text name is the name of a famfamfam icon. Although it could be the name of any icon you add to the IconLibrary (that might become clearer tomorrow).

Before I settled on using an "icon library" of embedded images I had used the approach where the value in the column was something like 005 or 113 -- the same as Notes. Then the column renderer pointed the Image to:

"http://server/icons/vwicn"+columnValue+".gif"

It worked but was a bit flickery as the view scrolled. As though each row re-fetched the image from the server each time the row came in to view.

The embedded approach is much more reliable. More tomorrow.

Reply from Dragon Cotterill

Dragon Cotterill — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:09:12 -0600

Hmmm. But if you're working purely in the Notes world of generating data, you can have two possible options in this column. The first being the good old icon numbers for the standard Icons. Or you can use a text name pointing to an image resource. I, like many others, am partial to Famfamfam's Silk icons and use them as well as the Notes icons at times.