Odd behaviour for rowSpan in Flex

Question

I am experiencing some oddities when working with a Grid component in flex, I have the following form that uses a grid to align the fields, as you can see, each GridRow has a border.

My problem is that the border is still visible through GridItems that span multiple rows (observe the TextArea that spans 4 rows, the GridRow borders go right threw it!)

Any ideas of how to fix this?

Answer 1

I think the problem is that when the Grid is drawn, it draws each row from top to bottom, and within each row the items left to right. So the row-spanned <mx:TextArea> item is drawn first extending down into the area of the 2 next rows, which get drawn after and on top.

The quickest way around I can see would be to draw the row borders on the <mx:GridItem>s instead, skipping the left and right edges based on the item's placement in the row. Something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
    <mx:Style>
        Grid {
            background-color: white;
            horizontal-gap: 0;
        }
        GridItem {
            padding-top: 5;
            padding-left: 5;
            padding-right: 5;
            padding-bottom: 5;
            background-color: #efefef;

            border-style: solid;
            border-thickness: 1;
            border-color: black;
        }
        .left {
            border-sides: top, bottom, left;
        }
        .right {
            border-sides: top, bottom, right;
        }
        .center {
            border-sides: top, bottom;
        }
    </mx:Style>
    <mx:Grid>
        <mx:GridRow>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="left">
                <mx:Label text="Label"/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="center">
                <mx:ComboBox/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="center">
                <mx:Label text="Label"/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="right">
                <mx:ComboBox/>
            </mx:GridItem>
        </mx:GridRow>
        <mx:GridRow>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="left">
                <mx:Label text="Label"/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="center">
                <mx:TextInput/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem colSpan="2" rowSpan="3">
                <mx:VBox width="100%" height="100%">
                    <mx:Label text="Label"/>
                    <mx:TextArea width="100%" height="100%"/>
                </mx:VBox>
            </mx:GridItem>
        </mx:GridRow>
        <mx:GridRow>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="left">
                <mx:Label text="Label"/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="center">
                <mx:TextInput/>
            </mx:GridItem>
        </mx:GridRow>
        <mx:GridRow>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="left">
                <mx:Label text="Label"/>
            </mx:GridItem>
            <mx:GridItem styleName="center">
                <mx:TextInput/>
            </mx:GridItem>
        </mx:GridRow>
    </mx:Grid>
</mx:Application>