Flex 101 Components and Containers with John Wilker

I am sitting in the Flex 101 Components and Containers course. I say course because unlike the other 3 tracks the room set aside for the Flex 101 track is set up with tables, power supplies and ready for some hard core coding.

This session is taught by John Wilker. John is very good at explaining simply the inner workings of Flex. He is building an RSS reader application right now and explaining the MXML tags used.

Canvas

Used to set position of the application.

HBox / VBox

Lays out children containers in a horizontal / vertical fashion.

Form

Contains FormItem tags. FormItem tags have labels and contain specific types of data collection fields. The Default behaviour of the Form tag is to place the labels on the left, text-aligned right and the data collection objects on the right. This can of course, be changed to suit your needs. The form tag has NO behaviour. It is purely a layout container.

Grid

Lays out tabular data.

HDividedBox/ VDividedBox

Lays out and divides the children horizontally / vertically. Allows the user to resize the divisions.

Panel

Makes a bordered section of content and has useful properties such as Title. Very nice rounded corners!

Tile

Very similar to the grid, I am not sure what the differences are at the moment. I need to read up on this.

ApplicationControlBar

Sticks a container at the top of the mxml application. Useful to place controls to use with the application. Has a dock=true/false property that if true, will peg the controlbar to the top and exempt it from scrolling. I might have to play around with this.

ViewStack

A non-visual control used to group a series of containers. Only one container is visible at any time and you can programmatically control the bisible component using the selectedIndex property of the ViewStack. Out of the box, the change in visible items is immediate though it is possible to customize and extend the ViewStack to do this.