Well the IconItemRenderer and LabelItemRenderer have a similar issue. So lets just say you create a list and you wish to skin the list exactly how you like or use it in a tile layout or something other than vertical then you will find some lines above and below your renderers which look out of place. You can’t get rid of them no matter what property styles you set.

The fix is pretty straight forward but why does there have to be some hardcoded values in something that is meant to be very versatile?

So inside the LabelItemRenderer around lines 881 you will see the following. It uses these values to draw separators whether you like it or not.

// separators are a highlight on the top and shadow on the bottom
topSeparatorColor = 0xFFFFFF;
topSeparatorAlpha = .3;
bottomSeparatorColor = 0x000000;
bottomSeparatorAlpha = .3;

So the quickest way of dealing with this is to override the drawBackground function in your own class which is created in LabelItemRenderer. This doesn’t get called from IconItemRenderer so you can quite simple copy the entire function and just remove the separator chunk and do not call super from your function which overrides the drawBackground.

Better still would be to change the hard coded values to styles from a CSS file.

var topSeparatorColor : uint = getStyle( 'topSeparatorColor' );
var topSeparatorAlpha : Number = getStyle( 'topSeparatorAlpha' );
topSeparatorAlpha = isNaN( topSeparatorAlpha ) ? 1 : topSeparatorAlpha;

If you’re setting a Number just remember to check for NaN’s in case you haven’t set a style, uints default to 0 anyway.

So how do you call a function that may have any number of arguments. Well here is the code and it should speak for itself.

 protected function checkSomethingThenCallOtherFunction(
    method : Function, args : Array = null ) : void
 {
    if( something.length < someMaxLimit )
    {
        method.apply( null, args );
    }
    else
    {
        //do something else
    }
}

So how easy is that? Pass in the function and an array of arguments, that’s all.

You can check out the app here.

After a comment/question from the previous post asking about something I didn’t explain, I thought that it deservered its own post rather than just an edit of the original.

So the question was how do you get the circular effect, and how do you do ‘(… %)’ in the legend?

The effect

Firstly set up the effect

<mx:SeriesInterpolate id="doughnut" duration="1000" />

Then whatever ID you have given your pie series you’d do the following (I called my one ‘seriesOne’)

seriesOne.setStyle('showDataEffect', doughnut);

(I did this set up in the script block on creation complete or show + I nulled the effect/DP’s on hide so that you get the full effect each time)

If you wish to get the full opening of the circle effect then the data must be empty to start with as the effect just changes between the current and the new values.

The second part of the question was to do with the labels on the legend.  This one is all to do with how you set up your dataprovider for the pie chart.

The label

I start of with loading in the data from an XML file (if you use some HTTP tool you should be able to see the data).  It goes something like the following

<chartOne>
  <chartName>blah</chartName>
  <data>
    <section>
      <name>item 1</name>
      <value>37.55</value>
    </section>
    <section>
      <name>item 2</name>
      <value>13.33</value>
    </section>               
  </data>
</chartOne>

As you’ll see from the data there is no ‘%’. So what I do is when I load the data I construct an object VO (value object).

This VO contains the name, item and a label.  The label is just the name + ‘(‘ + value +’%)’.  Then the arrayCollection I use for the dataprovider is just a collection of these object VO’s.

Essentially my VO is this,

var obj : Object =new Object();
obj.name = 'item 1';
obj.value = 37.55;
obj.label = obj.name + '(' + obj.value +'%)';

The legend looks at the data for the pie chart and sees the label property and uses that as it is.

This may make you ask about the datatip for the actual pie chart as it doesn’t contain the brackets. Well for that I had to implement a dataTipFunction.

This function took the form,

private function returnToolTip(hitData:HitData):String {
    return hitData.item.name + ' ' +hitData.item.value + '%';
}

and you just can set this in the MXML of the pie chart.

Well hopefully thats explained in a reasonable way, I’d love to open the entire source for this but without reworking it (commercial reasons) I can’t.

Check out part one of the blog here.

http://www.insideria.com/2009/05/new-york-times-air-reader-rele.html

Well what I didn’t know until today was at the same time the NYT have released a Silverlight kit so that developers can build an app using Silverlight and pull in various articles from the NYT.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2009/05/Times-Silverlight

This just seems like very bad timing and another kick in the teeth for Silverlight (don’t get me wrong I’d like to have as many RIA languages out there to give me a choice depending on the project requirements). So around the same week they release a kit for Silverlight they drop their Silverlight reader in favour of a AIR reader due to issues with Silverlight.

http://firstlook.blogs.nytimes.com/category/times-reader/

I think we still need to wait a while for Silverlight to mature a bit (which I’m sure it will) before using it fully.  

It would be interesting to find out how many of the major early adaptors of Silverlight are still using it. Every now and then you hear of a major Silverlight project being dropped in favour of flash/AIR.  Am I just not reading the MS blogs which have the opposite (i.e. flash/AIR projects being dropped for Silverlight)?