Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 3)

Review Part 2

The author of the blog post I originally found that inspired this journey said that this method would not cause the selection and rollover indicators to be obscured in the same way as this method. But I really wanted to be able to see these indicators, rather than a tiny edge around each row. So I was determined that I was going to get my AdvancedDatagridItemRenderer to allow me to see these indicators through it.

The first thing I'd tried, just setting the alpha property, hadn't worked. The next thing I tried was to try to use the graphics functions to draw a background like I did in the AdvancedDatagridGroupItemRenderer. Unfortunately, since the AdvancedDatagridItemRenderer does not inherit from UIComponent or DisplayObjectContainer, so it neither had a graphics object of its own nor any way to add one.

So I stuck my nose back into the docs and discovered that my TextField had a colorTransform object that I should be able to manipulate to change the alpha transparency. Well, I was able to change its alpha property, but there was absolutely no visible change.

Finally, I realized I was going to have to leave the Flex world and see what the Flash world had to offer. So I came across this post and was able to get the transparency by changing the blend mode. Still, my AdvancedDatagridItemRenderer and AdvancedDatagridGroupItemRenderer did not match, because the text in the AdvancedDatagridItemRenderer was semitransparent and the AdvancedDatagridGroupItemRenderer text was not. Lesson Number 2: Anything that inherits from TextField is only going to be able to support alpha transparency with difficulty, and even then the entire component, including the text, will be alpha transparent.

So I had the simple idea that I could use the AdvancedDatagridGroupItemRenderer to do all the item rendering.

Tomorrow, I will talk about getting the icons to render properly.