Nick Bilyk

MNSWF Camp is April 6th in Minneapolis at the Central Library
http://www.mnswf.com/camp/

FlashMN will be hosting a table at FlashBelt this year! Look for us there, we'll have some entertainment and a drawing. We will be offering a 2100$ Adobe software giveaway in order to promote the user group.

*NEW* This Wednesday (May 20th), FlashMN will be giving away two free passes!

If you've ever built a highly customized project before, using the Flex DataGrid, you'll know how much of a headache it can be.

• It chokes on sorting 20K or more rows on custom fields like Dates, case-insensitive Strings, or other data types.
• When you have custom item renderers, you have no easy way of accessing the cell instances.
• It's nearly impossible to extend or add your own functionality.
• Editing with it is troublesome and the UI leaves something to be desired.

So I wrote my own.

In case somebody needs it. Here's a URLValidator. I'm sure there are plenty out there, but it was quick to write, so here it is.

package com.nbilyk.flex.validators {
	import mx.validators.ValidationResult;
	import mx.validators.Validator;
 
	public class URLValidator extends Validator {
		public function URLValidator() {
			super();
		}
 
		private var _invalidUrlError:String = "This is an invalid URL.";
 
		[Inspectable(category="Errors", defaultValue="null")]
 
		/**
		 *  Error message when a string is not a valid url. 

I am in the Flash CS4 IDE.
I have a black background, and white text.

Then I click the white text to edit it.

White on white.... brilliant... Adobe, seriously.

I found a great article I thought I'd share:
http://avatar-soft.ro/blog/?p=4

It's how to prevent your browser from scrolling when you are scrolling with flash content.

I fixed a minor bug and made it as a js file, so to use it, just download the js file (remove the .txt) and add this to your html code.

  <script type="text/javascript" src="hookMouseWheel.js"></script>

Easy enough?

A client asked me to do something seemingly simple.
"I want the Alert to have just this one sentence bolded."

Well, it's not exactly simple, so here's how you do it:

  var str:String = "There was a problem with your form. ";
  str += " <b>Would you like to continue without saving?</b>";
  var alert:Alert = Alert.show(str, "Problems in data entry", Alert.YES | Alert.NO, 
                                                         Application.application as Sprite);
  use namespace mx.core.mx_internal;
  IUITextField(alert.alertForm.textField).htmlText = str;

You have a flex component and you want to prevent the user from being able to leave its focus using the tab key.

Here's what I tried first without any success.

• Cancel the TAB key down event.
• Change or extend the focus manager's behaviour.
• Cancel the focus out event. (This almost worked, except when the focus out causes Flex itself to lose focus.)

If you know how to accomplish this with any of these approaches, I'd love to hear how.

So here's what I ended up doing.
I first created a dummy TabStopper UIComponent.