What's a good way to make a Flex component with placeholders in it?
- by Daniel Brockman
I want to create a component that has a couple of "holes" that are to be filled in differently on each use. Currently, I'm doing it like this (using the Flex 4 framework in this example --- it would look almost the same for Flex 3):
public var fooComponent : IVisualElement;
public var barComponent : IVisualElement;
override protected function createChildren() : void
{
super.createChildren();
fooContainer.addElement(fooComponent);
barContainer.addElement(barComponent);
}
<Group id="fooContainer"/>
<!-- ... other components ... -->
<Group id="barContainer"/>
This works well, but it's kind of a lot of code to write for something so simple.
What I'd like is something like this:
[Bindable] public var fooComponent : IVisualElement;
[Bindable] public var barComponent : IVisualElement;
<Placeholder content="{fooComponent}"/>
<!-- ... other components ... -->
<Placeholder content="{barComponent}"/>
Now, I could implement the Placeholder component myself, but I can't help wondering if there isn't a better way to do this using the existing tools in the Flex framework.
Theoretically, with the proper compiler support, it could even be boiled down to something like this:
<Placeholder id="fooComponent"/>
<!-- ... other components ... -->
<Placeholder id="barComponent"/>
