Popup Menus and Graphical Buttons

Published on June 30, 2007 in flex. 8 Comments

Skinning Flex controls can be a pain. You need a designer who really knows what they’re doing and you have to embed your assets in your application (or at least I haven’t seen a way around that).

On a current flex project we want some buttons nicely designed by a flash guy. Those buttons should open a popup menu with more buttons on it. (like any standard toolbar)

Requirements:

  • Easy way for designer to create graphical buttons.
  • A way of using those graphical buttons in a button/popup combination
  • Load assets at runtime so they can be swapped out easily (for different languages for instance)
  • Include keyboard navigation
  • Simple to use

Solution:

First, I created a graphical button that will load in a standard swf with some specially named frames. The designer puts the different button states in the different frames. (There HAS to be a standard Flex control for this, but I couldn’t find it. Any suggestions? I’d love to replace my little custom implementation with a standard one.)

Then I created a combo-box like control that uses those buttons with a popup menu.

Results:
http://www.rogue-development.com/popup_menu/sandbox.html

I’ll package this up and publish under an MIT license sometime soon if anyone else is interested.

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