We have a product right now that has a basic shopping cart in it… and one of the options is to save the cart and view it as a pdf… so we send the request to the server, and return a link back with a link to the pdf, and
because we may have many messages come back from this one service we just use a simple alert box to show the user the feedback and that the application has saved successfully… if we need to put a link in there, the user must copy and paste the link in order to use it… WELLL, the small challenge was to make that a clickable link, and in the least amount of time possible… (15 minutes, rather than 2 hours for styling and the component itself) (it actually took longer to write the blog post, and put up the example than it did to fix the issue)

I was asked to create a component that allows for htmlText to be added to it, and the component has to have all the functionality of an Alert box… so why not extend the alert box, and make something like a BaseAlert.as file that extends Alert…

because you still have to use Alert.show in your application to use it… so rather than going to all the work of creating a way to popup the popup from anywhere in the app, and making sure it dispatches CloseEvents like the original Alert box does, I did some digging and found a forum list that gave the greatest tip EVER! I never really use mx_internal… frankly it confuses me a little bit… the syntax is a little wonkey to me… I’ve never used the whole “::” thing and don’t really understand what it does… someone care to explain?

anyway, I thought this persons simple code was absolutely great!

var a:Alert=Alert.show("dump text");
a.mx_internal::alertForm.mx_internal::textField.htmlText =
some HTMl text goes here;

here is a link to the message post

They do neglect to mention that you have to import the internal namespace though, so in my example thats included. This is a very quick and cheap solution to the problem and just provides a way to fancy up the alert box a little bit by adding the “limited” html text that the flash platform supports… maybe flash 10 will add better htmlText support…. I would assume so with all of the text changes to the platform… but I havent looked into it so don’t quote me…

Application – Source

Basically you have reserved keywords in flex like “id” and “class” amongst others… I was traversing through some xhtml that i brought in remotely and it had many div tags. One of the issues I ran into with it was trying to manipulate div’s with certain class attributes… so i was doing some searching through the html with e4x and trying to grab things with e4x operators like body..div.(@class == ‘headlineText’) this would theoretically grab all of my div tags that have that class name…

but the compiler bombs on this and says class is reserved… so the proper syntax for this is body..div.(@['class'] == ‘headline’) I found this when looking at some xml standards online
NOTE: you may get an error: ‘A term is undefined and has no properties’ error when searching for divs that don’t have the class attribute… you pretty much have use a for each loop and loop through the div XMLList that you would get back from these operations:

var body:XML = myXML.body[0];
var divList:XMLList = body..div; //searchs body for all div tags

then you would loop through them.

for each( var p:XML in divList )
{
if( p.@['class'] == ‘headlineText’ )
//do something
}
}

for some reason you get an error when trying to filter this way with xml when the attribute isn’t there… this only seems to happen when you use filtering operations like body..div (which gets all of the div’s) I think it may actually be a bug… it seems to me this should just return an empty XMLList if there isn’t any found… but i guess it just doesnt work…. hmmm… anyway

thats all for now.

Application - Source

This post is in direct relation with my post a few days ago on Customizing the Rich Text Editor

This new post adds an example tab that shows when you put in a link in the TextEditor it underlines it in the TextArea… rather than the ridiculous previous Flex RichTextEditor just leaving it blank, and only changing the cursor when hovering over the tag… I hate how it doesnt actually underline the link in the text editor… so I needed to override the setTextStyles() method… it’s all about overriding the setTextStyles… and you just can’t do that with the default Flex RTE…

I scrapped the default RTE and copied and pasted out the code… I don’t think we will run into any backwards compatibility problems because its just an mxml class. After taking the code, I made sure to at least put some updated comments in the top of the file ACJEditor.mxml… I documented that I adjusted the setTextStyles function to now take a new parameter called tf…

tf is a TextFormat class in flash, any change event in the RTE hits up the setTextStyles and you can pass it your own manipulated TextFormat. You can do a little bit more with this… now you can manipulate the htmlText fairly easily to at least show your changes… I used it to show an underline underneath the <a href > tags… I don’t quite have this working on load, it only seems to be happening on the addition of a link… I’m working on that, but pretty much prototyping right now to show it’s at least now possible… where as with the Flex RTE it just wasn’t… you couldn’t do jack squat because everything was private…

so please feel free take a shot at the new example, and get the source… feel free to manipulate it, and please BLOG ABOUT IT! it helps the community…

I’ve also gotten quite a few comments with the other post Customizing the Rich Text Editor and one of them mentions having an image show up inside the text editor… frankly i’m not even sure if this is possible at all… i haven’t fully looked at the TextFormat class yet, but because TextFormat is really what is formatting the html it is internal to flash… so as far as that goes, and getting it to actually show up in a textArea… I really am not to sure about that…

Application - Source

anyway… i suppose thats enough ramblings for now.