Flex TextArea - Extended
Since this is my first blog post here, I think I should briefly introduce myself. I've been working with Mark for a couple of months and if you add an 'o' to his name, you get my name. I've been using ColdFusion for about 7 years and lately my interest has slightly shifted towards Flex/Air/AS3.
Recently I was working on a Flex project where one of the things I had to do was to implement validation to preventusers from typing in more than 'n' characters in a TextArea. Instead of just setting a maxlength, I decided to have some sort of visual alert when that number is reached as well as display the character count at the bottom-right of the text area.
So, I extended the TextArea class and added a few simple validations to it. Here is an example of how to call the custom TextArea class in AS:
private function init():void {
// AS example var myText:TextAreaValidator = new TextAreaValidator();
var textWidth:Number = 400;
var textHeight:Number = 200;
myText.width = textWidth;
myText.height = textHeight;
myText.maxChars = 20;
myText.showTooltip = true;
addChild(myText);
}
In MXML, you would call the component like this:
This is a nice and simple example of how you can customise Flex components to suit your needs :)
Here's a screen shot:
Grab the source from here.