Popup Menus and Graphical Buttons

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.

7 Responses to “Popup Menus and Graphical Buttons”


  1. 1 bongiovanni

    Really nice component ! good work :)

  2. 2 Anonymous

    Yep. There are people interested.

  3. 3 Shaun

    Definitely interested. This could come in very handy for a project that I’m working on.

  4. 4 Enrico Foschi

    Wonderful component. Yes, we are really interested in!!!! :)

  5. 5 Oluwaseun

    Hi, I’m working on a project and I can’t seem to get this popup menu like you have done. I’d appreciate if you can send me your source.

    Good work you’ve done

    Thanks.

  6. 6 Marc

    General download link:

    http://rogue-development.com/swfControls.xml

    Source code:

    http://www.rogue-development.com/uploads/SwfControls.zip

    I haven’t touched this in a few months so it may require some tinkering to get working property with flex builder 3.

  7. 7 Oluwaseun

    Thanks Marc. I’ve got a little one did. I’d like to send it to you but how do i get it across so you could check it i.e. how do i upload it on this blog?

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