Alex’s Flex Closet

The previous posts used custom ILists to merge or concatenate other ILists. This example uses a custom subclass of ArrayCollection to fake an empty object at the end of the actual ArrayCollection which can be used to add new entries to the DataGrid.
If the user fills out the new entry, it is added to the actual collection and another new entry is faked. Additional logic dictates that if the user strips all information out of an entry, that entry is removed from the actual collection.
Usual caveats apply
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Following up on the last post which showed how to use custom ILists to merge two collections, this post shows how to use a custom IList to concatenate or append two collections.
Such a thing might be useful in a situation where you want to add more than one prompt to a ComboBox. In the example, I have the days of the week to choose from, but also want to add “Every Day”, “Weekdays” and “Weekends” without modifying the original days of the week collection. Of course, if you concatenate the two collections, it offsets your selectedIndex.
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Earlier I published how to do a CheckBoxDataGrid where the selection model uses CheckBoxes instead of mouse clicks. I should have mentioned that the example used the DataGrid’s selection logic which meant that the dataprovider item’s selected state was not stored in the dataProvider and thus you couldn’t sort by whether an item was selected or not.
If you have a selected field in your data, then the code to handle checkbox selection is quite different. You basically shut down the DataGrid’s selection code and update the collection instead. You can see that in the source code for this example.
This example goes one step further, however. It assumes that you want to store selection in the dataProvider, but the dataProvider items don’t have a selected field and are “immutable”. The example code shows how to use a custom IList to merge two arrays or ArrayCollections into one merged collection where the data objects contain fields from both arrays. By doing that you can “add” a selected field to each item.
Custom ILists are a powerful way to change data without having to process each data item. The example code merges the items on-demand instead of up-front thus saving startup time. It would be wasteful to process 1000 items if you only show 7 and the user doesn’t scroll past 20.
Anyway, here’s the code. Usual caveats apply.
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Several people have asked about changing the default editing behavior of a DataGrid so that starting an edit session requires a double-click instead of the default single-click.
Here’s my approach:
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One of the features that got cut from 3.0 was “smooth scrolling”. List and other list-related classes scroll by row/column which can be a bit choppy at times. We tried to leave the hooks in to allow someone to do it, but we ran out of time to finish the job.
It’s too bad we didn’t finish the job as there are some difficult things to workaround in trying to get smooth scrolling to work, but I cooked this prototype up to give you a sense for how you might be able to get it working in your apps. Note that the prototype assumes that all rows are the same height. If you have variableRowHeight, that’s a whole different problem.
Usual caveats apply, and no, I don’t currently have time to make examples for TileList and DataGrid. Maybe some one else will have the time.
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