Here are a few options to develop Flex Custom Components that are really flexible.

In addition to allow styling options, a really flexible component should allow other developers to change and customize its behavior to accommodate their own specific needs with as less as possible additional efforts. OOP, Design Pattern, SDK secrets: make your choice!

Right clicking on Flex Applications displays a menu: the Flex Context Menu.

Learn how to customize Flex Context Menus to:

• add your own entries,
• assign different menus to different elements of your application,
• workaround some of the Flex Context Menu limitations.

If you prefer, check the sample application with source code enabled that illustrates all the points discussed here .

You probably heard, read or even learned that Flex was managing the memory automatically for you, does it mean you don’t have any responsibility regarding memory management in Flex? Absolutely not!

If you’re surprised by my answer, keep reading to understand how memory is managed in Flex using garbage collection, what responsibilities this is putting on developers, what the classical causes of memory leaks are and what are the good practices to enhance or optimize the memory management in your applications.

After having discussed how to apply styles to Flex custom components, let’s learn how to add Events to Flex custom components such that they can be smoothly integrated in any other custom component or in any application.

The covered subjects are:

• Introduction to Flex Events
• Listening to Events
• Sending Events
• Creating a Custom Event Type
• Creating a Custom Event Class
• The Event Flow

After having understood in details the Flex Component Life Cycle, let’s look at ways to add styles to Flex custom components.

You can find a lot of information about styling a component in Adobe documentation, but the most interesting parts are somewhat hidden at the bottom of different pages of multiple sections.

So, here’s my synthesis describing the two “best ways” of Styling a Flex Custom Component efficiently.

Now that we have a nice looking Preloader, we’re close to be ready starting developing new Flex Custom Components.

Anyway, before doing so, we need to clearly understand what is the Flex Component Life Cycle. A good understanding of this Life Cycle is really mandatory to be able to develop “correctly” a Flex Custom Component.

Code extracts are provided to illustrate the different principles discussed below, use the “See code sample” links to look at them, use the “See explanations” links to come back to the explanations.