Macromedia flex 2 Manual

Implementing a template component

197

The implementation of the topRow and bottomRow properties lets you specify any Flex 
component as a value, as the following example shows:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- templating/MainTemplateLink.mxml -->
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
    xmlns:MyComp="myComponents.*"
    height="700" width="700">

    <mx:Panel paddingTop="10" paddingBottom="10" 
        paddingRight="10" paddingLeft="10">
    
        <MyComp:MyTemplateComponent id="myTComp2">
            <MyComp:topRow>                        
                <mx:TextArea text="top component"/>
            </MyComp:topRow>
            <MyComp:bottomRow>
                <mx:LinkButton label="Link 1"/>         
                <mx:LinkButton label="Link 2"/>
                <mx:LinkButton label="Link 3"/>
            </MyComp:bottomRow>
        </MyComp:MyTemplateComponent>
    </mx:Panel>
</mx:Application>

In this example, the top component is a 

TextArea

 control, and the bottom components are 

two 

LinkButton

 controls.

Implementing a template component 

The section 

 shows an example of a template 

component named MyTemplateComponet. Flex provides you with two primary ways to 
create template components: 

■

Create properties with general data types, such as 

UIComponent

 or 

Container

■

Create properties with the type IDeferredInstance. 

The following sections describes these methods.

Using general data types in a template component

This section shows one implementation of the component MyTemplateComponent shown in 
the section 

 by defining the properties topRow 

and bottomRow to be of type 

UIComponent

. Users of the component can then specify any 

object to these properties that is either an instance of the UIComponent class, or an instance 
of a subclass of UIComponent.