Programming Flex 2

Chapter 7. Working with UI Components

The Flex framework consists, in large part, of components. Within the framework there are many types of components, from data components to layout components to user interface (UI) components. You can read about each type of component in the appropriate chapters throughout this book. In this chapter, we focus on UI components. UI components are visual components that display something to the user and/or prompt the user to interact with the application.

Although there’s no formal classification for the majority of the UI components in the Flex framework, it is useful to categorize them just for the purposes of discussion. We’ve organized our discussion of the UI components based on the categories listed in Table 7-1.

Table 7-1. UI component categories

Category	Components
Buttons	Button, LinkButton, RadioButton, CheckBox
Value selectors	HSlider, VSlider, NumericStepper, ColorPicker, DateField, DateChooser
Text components	Label, Text, TextInput, TextArea, RichTextEditor
List-based controls	List, ComboBox, DataGrid, HorizontalList, TileList, Tree
Pop-up controls	PopUpButton, PopUpMenuButton
Windows	Panel, TitleWindow
Navigators	ViewStack, Accordion, ButtonBar, LinkBar, MenuBar, TabBar, TabNavigator, ToggleButtonBar
Control bars	ControlBar, ApplicationControlBar
Media and progress indicators	Image, SWFLoader, VideoDisplay, ProgressBar

Tip

Layout containers are not included in the preceding table because they are discussed entirely within their own chapter (Chapter 6).