Flex/Flash

A TileList is part of a group of elements that allow you to add components in a specific order and orientation. The TileList controls the displaying of a number of items set out as tiles and so it best suited to displaying images as thumbnails.

There are many ways to do this, but none of the examples on the Flex site seemed to be very useful, or very well explained. What I wanted to do was to create a TileList that displayed the tiles in a certain way and used an XML file to fill up the list of items with images, each image having a label associated with it.

The first thing to do is to create the TileList element.

<mx:TileList id="imageTileList"
itemRenderer="CustomItemRenderer"
dataProvider="{theImages}"
width="200"
height="400"
columnCount="2"
creationComplete="initList();"/>

This contains three important attributes, which I have described here.

Yesterday I talked about creating some simple Flex elements in your application. Today I will introduce a new element called Script.

The Script element, if you haven't already guessed is used to run your application function and should be contained within the Application element. You can either put script inline like this.

<mx:Script>
// some code here
</mx:Script>

Or you can use the source attribute and link it with an external ActionScript source file.

One common thing that can be done with Flash is to create presentations. These presentations can then be exported to a swf file and viewed by just about everybody.

To make a presentation create a new flash document and create a new layer. This layer will be used to keep the next and previous buttons in a consistent place.

On the first frame add the following code to stop the animation running at the first frame.

stop();

Next, create a button that you can use for moving forward and backward through the presentation. This can be done by drawing an object on the stage, right clicking on it and selecting Convert to Symbol.... You can then add these buttons to the stage and create events for them.

For the previous button a function exists in ActionScript called prevFrame(). So all you need to do is attach that function call to the release event (ie. after a user has clicked on it) on that button.