How do you tell if a component is in a transition?
I'm working on Fleshing out the Flextras CalendarDisplay component. I think I'm finally happy with our approach to implementing a day view. One of the things we want to support is the ability to transition between a month view, a week view, and a day view.
Transitioning from a day display to a month display was working fine. Transitioning from the month to the day was not. After stepping through the code I discovered that the updateDisplayList() method would resize the day before the effect ran, thus negating the effect.
I needed a way to figure out if a transition was playing and tell the component not to run the updateDisplayList() method.
I've seen some situations where you set a Boolean value "transitionRunning" to true before running the play method, then set it back to false in a listener to the effectEnd method.
But, that wouldn't work in this situation. If the transition is a transition between two states, then all the code for starting / stopping the effects is locked up in private methods of UIComponent.
I ended up writing this method to loop over the transitions array and figure out if one of the effects was playing.
if(this.transitions){
for each(var transition : Transition in this.transitions){
if(transition.effect.isPlaying){
return true;
}
}
}
return false;
}
My intuition tells me there should be an easier way, but I'm not sure what that is.
Update:
A friend on twitter recommended I take a look at the activeEffects property. The function would be modified like this:
if(this.activeEffects.length > 0){
return true;
}
return false;
}
Unfortunately, that didn't work. Even though a transition was running, it was not on the activeEffects array. I'm unsure why.
<mx:Blur id="blurEffect" />
<mx:Box addEffect="blurEffect" />
On the other hand, if you manually target and play
<mx:Blur id="blurEffect" target="box"/>
<mx:Box id="box">
<mx:Button creationComplete="blurEffect.play()" />
</mx:Box>
It will not show up in activeEffects :)