Custom cell in list in Flash AS3

Question

I am no expert in Flash, and I need some quick help here, without needing to learn everything from scratch.

Short story, I have to make a list where each cell contains an image, two labels, and a button.

List/Cell example:

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img - label - label - button

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img - label - label - button

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As a Java-programmer, I have tried to quicly learn the syntax and visualness of Flash and AS3, but with no luck so far. I have fairly understood the basics of movie clips etc.

I saw a tutorial on how to add a list, and add some text to it. So I dragged in a list, and in the code went list.addItem({label:"hello"}); , and that worked ofc. So i thought if I double-clicked the MC of the list, i would get to tweak some things. In there I have been wandering around different halls of cell-renderers etc.

I have now come to the point that I entered the CellRenderer_skinUp or something, and customized it to my liking. When this was done, I expected i could use list.addItem(); and get an empty "version" of my cell, with the img, labels and the button. But AS3 expects an input in addItem. From my object-oriented view, I am thinking that i have to create an object of the cell i have made, but i have no luck reaching it.. I tried to go var test:CellRenderer = list.listItem; list.addItem(test);

..But with no luck.

This is just for funsies, but I really want to make this work, however not so much that I am willing to read up on ALOT of Flash and AS3. I felt that I was closing in on the prize, but the compiler expected a semicolon after the variable (list.addItem({test:something});).

Note: If possible, I do NOT want this: list.addItem({image:"src",label:"text",label"text",button:"text"}); Well.. It actually is what I want, but I would really like to custom-draw everything.

Does anyone get what I am trying to do, and has any answers for me? Am I approaching this the wrong way? I have searched the interwebs for custom list-cells, but with no luck. Please, any guiding here is appreciated!

Sti

Answer 1

You could use a Datagrid as well, with each column pointing to the appropriate part of the data source (possibly even the same field, depending on what you're doing). You can then just use the ImageCell as the renderer for the second and third colums.

I think you're just not understanding that Adobe, in the own woolly-headed little way, is separating the Model from the View on your behalf. You hand the Model to the View and then get out of the way. The extent of what you can/should change is just telling it what renderer to pop your data into.

In fact, the fl.controls don't give you much control at all about how they work--I wouldn't go down the road of trying to create a custom itemRenderer with any signifcant functionality for them if you don't fully understand how the Display List works and if you're not comfortable digging around in the debugger and ferreting out all kinds of undocumented information.

For more details (to the extent anyone knows anything about how these work), see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/datagrid_pt1.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/datagrid_pt2.htmlhttp://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/datagrid_pt3.html http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/tilelist_component_as3.html

Do you have the option to use the Flex Framework instead of pure Flash? It makes this kind of extension much more satisfying. It's aimed more at application developers, whereas Adobe sees Flash users more as designers.