Spark Forms, Validation, and Errors

One of my previous posts on Always showing error tips (validators) presented one way of trying and improve the built-in validation error handling in Flex. It was a nice idea, but as many people have pointed out in the comments there are too many different use cases that causes the error tips to not show up properly.

Below is another alternative approach, and one that I hope is less of a hack.

I've created a class called InputControl which is very similar to the Flex 3 FormItem. It has a label property, and can contain one or more child elements.

What this control does that makes it useful is to listen for when the errorString property changes on an input control (such as a TextInput), and instead of displaying the default Flex error toolTip, it shows that errorString in a label that is always visible. It also immediately clears the input's errorString property so that the default error toolTip is not displayed.

The InputControl class is skinnable, and I've created two different skins. The default one InputControlSkin has the same layout as the FormItem (label on the left) and displays the error string on the right of the input.

The second skin is called InputControlVerticalSkin which displays the label, input, and error message in a vertical layout. This skin is more suited for large inputs like a TextArea.

There are definitely a few issues with this approach:
- longer error messages either don't show up properly or are truncated
- form label alignment is not customizable

Feel free to modify my code to make it work differently. Most properties are hard coded in the skins, and I didn't spend the time to extract them out into styles.

Here it is in action, right click to view source:

State Transitions

I've put together a little example of how you can use transitions to animate between the states in your application component.

There are many websites explaining Flex 3 states as well as the new and improved Flex 4 states.

If you don't already use states, I would highly recommend you become familiar with them. They are very powerful, and make it much easier to create complex user interfaces.

Transitions are effects that are played when your component changes from one state to another state. They are a nice way to smoothly animate changing content, for example fading out content being hidden, or resizing containers that have new elements being added.

In the example below, I've created an application that has 5 states:

• Normal - default state
• Resize - resizes the main panel using a Resize effect
• Fade - fades in/out a Label using a Fade effect
• AnimateColor - animates a gradient color using the AnimateColor effect
• Easing - uses a Bounce easer with a Move transition

I've noticed that certain effects like Resize don't work properly with other effects like Fade. I haven't spent the time to try and figure out why not.

Anyway, here is the example. Right click to view source.