Someone in #cfflex on DALnet was asking about a custom component. They wanted to have a component that had two lists in it, where selections from the first list would filter the options in the second. They had a method written out that would do the comparison and filtering on the two lists, but they [...]

The other day, someone asked me how they could re-use the code sample from Igor Costa’s post about getting the Rich Text Editor to output XHTML. Whenever you want to add functionality to an existing control, you just need to extend it. Here’s how: Here’s the top bit of code from my XHtmlEditor.as file: ::CODECOLORER_BLOCK_5:: The actual code [...]

Someone in #flex was talking about how there were no good examples for doing uploads with Flex and ColdFusion. Sounded like an excellent topic to cover here. Now this example is a tiny bit more complex than previous examples, because I needed to cover two methods of functionality: single file uploads and multi-file uploads. Both [...]

Disclaimer: This post is not about best practices or anything of that sort. This is just a recount of my first attempt at using Ant with an open-source Flex library project. Here are the steps I went through (well, minus the steps that did nothing) to get my first Ant build script up & running; Installing Ant There [...]

There was some confusion in #flex yesterday. The question came up on how a child component could access the parent component. Eventually, it came down to they wanted to pass some data from the child back to the parent. Well, the “black box” method of component programming says that we should use custom events to send [...]

Someone on #flex asked about preventing text from appearing in a TextInput or TextArea, when the user is using a keyboard shortcut. After a little discussion, I came up with a working example. I decided to use shift-space to simplify things. The first assumption is that you’re listening for keyboard shortcuts at the application level: ::CODECOLORER_BLOCK_12:: Now, you’ve [...]

Over the weekend I was writing a simple little app, and came across something that should have been trivial, but turned out to throw me for a loop momentarily. I needed to drive some data from XML instead of my tried-and-true ColdFusion components, and I realized I’d never done it before. So, here’s the example: First [...]

If you’ve ever created a form tall enough to require a vertical scroll bar in Flex, you may have not even have noticed that you have you scroll down manually when focus moves below the visible part of a window. Users, however, notice, especially if they don’t have a scroll wheel on their mouse. There [...]

I’ve decided since I attempt to help people in #flex (on EFNet) and #coldfusion / #cfflex (on DALNet) on a daily basis, that I’ll pick one simple question and try to whip up an example for everyone to see. Today, someone asked how to scale all children of a container. The basic answer is to just [...]

I forgot to mention here that I wrote up a nice Actionscript library for manipulating lists. It includes a majority of ColdFusion’s list functions, plus a few that we commonly use here at Webapper. Sometimes you just need a list instead of an array. Get the library here.