Kevin Hoyt

I’ve seen a number of customer inquiries of late that are focused around desired functionality that is not present in the calendar controls that are shipped with Flex. While these inquiries are all valid, the short answer is that the provided calendar controls do what they do. You could subclass them, but as controls go they are pretty complex. Rather than subclass the calendar controls to obtain the desired functionality, I propose, why not build your own calendar?

I think most developers have an aversion to trying to build their own calendar controls because they’ve tried it before with HTML/JavaScript and/or dynamic server generation, which quite frankly is a pain. In Flex however you have a consistent runtime and precision control over the placement and integration of ever last facet of the display. Where you might otherwise spend time trying to figure out how to subclass the existing calendar controls, building your own can bring many benefits with it such as specificity, performance and maintainability.
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I’ve been traveling and covering events here recently, but I’ve managed to squeeze out some time for a few upcoming technical posts. To start off the series I’m going to cover a question that came to me from a customer. The question had to do with customization of the various labels on the charting components. In this post we’ll take a look at customizing the chart data tip, horizontal axis labels and vertical axis labels.
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