ADOBE® FLEX® 3: PROGRAMMING ACTIONSCRIPT™ 3.0

ADOBE FLEX 3

Developer Guide

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The displayAsPassword property simply hides the text (displaying it as a series of asterisks) as the user types it.

When

displayAsPassword is set to true, the Cut and Copy commands and their corresponding keyboard

shortcuts will not function. As the following example shows, you assign the

displayAsPassword property just as

you would other properties, such as background and color:

myTextBox.type = TextFieldType.INPUT;

myTextBox.background = true;

myTextBox.displayAsPassword = true;

addChild(myTextBox);

The restrict property is a little more complicated since you need to specify what characters the user is allowed to

type in an input text field. You can allow specific letters, numbers, or ranges of letters, numbers, and characters. The

following code allows the user to enter only uppercase letters (and not numbers or special characters) in the text

field:

myTextBox.restrict = “A-Z”;

ActionScript 3.0 uses hyphens to define ranges, and carets to define excluded characters. For more information about

defining what is restricted in an input text field, see the

flash.text.TextField.restrict property entry in the

ActionScript 3.0 Language and Components Reference.

Formatting text

You have several options for programmatically formatting the display of text. You can set properties directly on the

TextField instance—for example, the

TextFIeld.thickness, TextField.textColor, and

TextField.textHeight properties. Or you can designate the content of the text field using the htmlText property

and use the supported HTML tags, such as

b, i, and u. But you can also apply TextFormat objects to text fields

containing plain text, or StyleSheet objects to text fields containing the

htmlText property. Using TextFormat and

StyleSheet objects provides the most control and consistency over the appearance of text throughout your appli-

cation. You can define a TextFormat or StyleSheet object and apply it to many or all text fields in your application.

Assigning text formats

You can use the TextFormat class to set a number of different text display properties and to apply them to the entire

contents of a TextField object, or to a range of text.

The following example applies one TextFormat object to an entire TextField object and applies a second TextFormat

object to a range of text within that TextField object:

var tf:TextField = new TextField();

tf.text = "Hello Hello";

var format1:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

format1.color = 0xFF0000;

var format2:TextFormat = new TextFormat();

format2.font = "Courier";

tf.setTextFormat(format1);

var startRange:uint = 6;

tf.setTextFormat(format2, startRange);

addChild(tf);