How to format a currency datafield in Flex

Question

I have an xml file providing data for a datagrid in Flex 2 that includes an unformatted Price field (ie: it is just a number). Can anyone tell me how I take that datafield and format it - add a currency symbol, put in thousand separators etc. Thanks. S.

Answer 1

As stated above an easy way to do this would be to add a labelFunction to the specified column and format the data within there.

Frequently I find that its much easier to work with objects then straight XML so normally if I am receiving XML from a function I would create an object and parser for that XML and you can format the data inside the parser also if you like.

Another way to handle this would be inside an itemRenderer. Example:

<mx:DataGridColumn id="dgc" headerText="Money" editable="false">
    <mx:itemRenderer>
      <mx:Component>
         <mx:HBox horizontalAlign="right">
        <mx:CurrencyFormatter id="cFormat" precision="2" currencySymbol="$" useThousandsSeparator="true"/>
            <mx:Label id="lbl" text="{cFormat.format(data)}" />
         </mx:HBox>
      </mx:Component>
    </mx:itemRenderer>
</mx:DataGridColumn>

Answer 2

Thanks alot for your answers...they helped a great deal.

In the end I went for a solution that involved the following three elements:

<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Price" textAlign="right"  labelFunction="formatCcy" width="60"/>

public function formatCcy(item:Object, column:DataGridColumn):String
        {
         return euroPrice.format(item.price);
        }

<mx:CurrencyFormatter id="euroPrice" precision="0" 
    rounding="none"
    decimalSeparatorTo="."
    thousandsSeparatorTo=","
    useThousandsSeparator="true"
    useNegativeSign="true"
    currencySymbol="€"
    alignSymbol="left"/>

I dont know whether this is the correct solution, but it seems to work (at the moment), Thanks again, S...

Answer 3

How about the CurrencyFormatter class

See here for docs from Flex 2. It's pretty easy to use.

You can use one of these in a labelFunction on a DataGrid Column to format your numbers.