On Jun 14, 2007, at 5:56 PM, Alex Harui wrote:
How about the excuse/reason that we don’t want to generate a renderer for every item in your dataprovider, and if they had variablerowheight, we’d never get the scrollbar parameters right?
I do echo Troy's thoughts on the list controls and their scroll capabilities. It's been a bane since the early days. I re-wrote the List component in Flash 8 to work the way I wanted. I think one of the issues that compounds this is that the framework is so deep and inheritance/interfaces really get in the way in trying to 'fix' or extend components in this manner. This is a very involved change with the current list control due to those situations.
You don't need to generate a renderer for every item in the data provider to do it. Right now, I believe it's the 1-frame bug that's causing the issue in cases where the images are definitely cached and available. Where dynamically loaded content (images/video) are not used, it shouldn't be a problem.
I used the move-first-to-last or move-last-to-first paradigm with the List control that I have in AS2. Very similar to the infinite scrolling movie trick.
As far as variablerowheight, that is a bit tricky as well. There are a few options though. Run a background task that runs through the data and generates a DisplayObject that you use over and over to calculate the scroll size from. Aside: Repeater really should do this - since right now it 'waits' while it generates the renderers and then displays the entire result - ouch!
Then again, I do stand by my point that, if a developer needs to display that much information in a grid, list or whatever, there's a design flaw in the data presentation. It's just not usable and is one of the very fundamental UI design issues that RIA developers run into. Heck, some UI old schoolers would even say that if it doesn't fit on screen you've got a problem.
We’re going with a fractional approach but I’m not convinced of how smooth it will appear in all situations. That and time-to- implement are reasons it remains planned and not committed.
I'd like to see a TileList component with smooth scrolling that implements a "maxItemRenderers" property and also adds a paging mechanism. I'm trying to do that right now with a custom Tile/ Repeater and a link bar. Trying to find an elegant way to do it is a bit tricky.
Speaking of ... if anyone is actually reading through this thread, have any of you implemented something similar to a Tile with repeater and paging? More to the point, a Tile component that uses an itemRenderer and handles selection (toggle, multiple select not necessary)?
Alex - thanks for looking into this though. I appreciate that Adobe does take our feedback seriously on component implementations and usability.
cheers, jon
