Tooltips are a good way to provide a user with additional information for controls and Flex offers Tooltips out of the box. The default Tooltips are fine but when text gets longer than just a few words usability may suffer.

For a current project, I needed more like a balloon help in place of tooltips and therefore decided not to use Flex default tooltips.

Regarding usability of the tooltips (balloon help) I want to be able to

• Display an optional tooltip title
• Display formatted tooltip text
• Display icons
• Colorize the tooltip based on the semantic of the invoking control
• Consistent Placement
• Have all title, text, styles for the tooltips stored in a central location
• Have the tooltips work in a generic and Flex-compliant way

Flex gives you a few ways to customize tooltips from registering your custom ToolTip class to intercepting Tooltip events where you can hook up the custom tooltip. All of these approaches fall either short of the requirements I had or would add additional overhead so I simply created a custom ToolTipManager that would alter the behaviour of the default ToolTipManager.

Here’s a demo of the final result, the approch is described further down.

Since I like to have all resources centralized, the approach I followed was to (more…)

Here’s a simple rating component done in Flex 4 (Gumbo).

The skin uses two library definitions. One symbol for the active and one for the passive rating. The symbols are then placed in a passive and an active Group. A mask is used to show/hide the active group based on the rating. ActiveGroup/passiveGroup and mask are the required Skin-Parts.

The Component itself manages the rating and pushes this down to the mask by setting its width. The rating is exposed as a bindable property.

The following example usees the component with two different skins.

source is here (SDK 4.0.0.4932)