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Changing fontWeight of Spark DataGrid headers

October 30th, 2011 4 comments

In Flex 4.5, we introduced the Spark version of DataGrid, which provides a vastly improved skinning experience. Unfortunately, a more flexible skin also means less tweaking through styles. One example is the DataGrid’s header’s label. By default, the “fontWeight” style is hard-coded to bold, along with some other text styles. Luckily, we’ve provided a relatively simple way to customize this particular piece of the header. This post will show you how to customize the Spark DataGrid’s header’s label.
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Customizing Spark DataGrid row and column separators

October 26th, 2011 1 comment

In Flex 4.5, we introduced the Spark version of DataGrid, which provides a vastly improved skinning experience. Spark DataGrid has a multitude of skin parts that can be customized and tweaked through its skin. These include the row backgrounds, row separators, column separators, selection indicators, caret indicator, hover indicator, etc… (see DataGrid Documentation). This post demonstrates two methods for customizing the row and column separators.
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Memory Graph to track Flash Player total memory usage

February 21st, 2010 9 comments

Sometimes it’s nice to keep an eye on the memory of an application without involving the Flash Builder profiler. This post demonstrates a simple and lightweight component that graphs the value of the Flash Player’s System.totalMemory over time. The chart can be very useful for noticing spikes in memory that might require further investigation with the profiler.
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Custom focus skin for spark components in Flex 4

January 24th, 2010 16 comments

In spark components, the focusSkin is treated differently from the normal skin. Unlike the skin of a spark component, the focusSkin is not automatically sized or positioned by the component. Instead, it is added as the first child of the component. In addition, if the focusSkin has a property called target, target is set to point to the parent component.
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Resizable TitleWindow in Flex 4

January 10th, 2010 34 comments

The spark TitleWindow allows you to drag it around the stage through the use of a skin part called “moveArea”. By attaching mouse handlers to the moveArea, the TitleWindow can be dragged around the screen. In a similar fashion, we can add another skin part called “resizeHandle” to allow the TitleWindow to be resizable.
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