Sep 25 2008
Aspire UI Preview: Tab Focus Management
Aspire has its own focus manager that overrides the native behavior of the Flash Player. The tab focus chain is automatically set up based on the containment hierarchy (ie, the child index order is the tab focus chain order) – you do not need to set up “tabIndex” manually in your application code.
Additionally, the tab focus chain will automatically include children and grandchildren, as demonstrated in the following diagram:
(The digits indicate the tab focus chain order)
uiFocusRect
The focus rectangle is rendered using the com.ghostwire.ui.core.uiFocusRect class, which is a subclass of the com.ghostwire.ui.core.uiBitmapImage class. This makes it easy to customize the focus rectangle using PNG bitmap files. By default, the “FocusRect.png” image in the theme folder is used to render the focus rectangle (scaling rules are set in the “rules.xml” file).
“focusRect” Property
Each uiComponent instance has a “focusRect” property, making it possible to use different renderers for the focus rectangle of different component instances (for example, a dark colored control may want to use a light colored focus rectangle). You can also set this property to “false”, if no focus rectangle is intended. Just like the “textStyle” property, if the value is undefined (which is the case by default), the component instance will use the value set for its parent container.
Aspire UI Components Trial Version
You may experiment with the various features of the Actionscript 3.0 (AS3) Aspire UI Components by downloading the trial version at http://www.ghostwire.com/aspireui/download/
* Adobe Flash CS3 is required
