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Styling Flex TextArea content with CSS

Good news: Flex 2.0.1 now supports CSS styling within textArea components, so the following workaround is no longer needed. I'll keep this article posted for posterity. -- Rob

The Flex 2 TextArea control won't currently let you apply a CSS stylesheet to it to format its HTML text content. Here's a workaround you can use for now until there's a more official solution.

If you try to set the styleSheet property of a standard TextArea control you get runtime error #2009: "This method cannot be used on a text field with a style sheet." That effectively prevents you from styling the HTML in a TextArea control.

You could of course apply a CSS stylesheet to a standard ActionScript 3.0 TextField (flash.text.TextField), but to make that work in Flex 2 you would have to build your own component and manage text scrolling yourself. That's not a task for the meek.

This workaround gives you the convenience of using a standard Flex TextArea plus the ability to style up its contents using CSS.

Encapsulating remote services in Flex 2

In order to build the Application Starter Kit I mentioned before, I'll start by building a simple Blog Reader application. Yes, I know blog reader apps have been done before. But it's a simple application that showcases remote services, XML reading and parsing, and other features that will be useful for the Starter kit.

This Blog Reader will display a list of articles from a RSS 2.0 feed. When you select the title of an article the app will display the text of that article.

If I were doing a *real* blog reader application I would use use the XML Syndication Library provided by Adobe on the Labs site. However that would make things too easy, since the library handles all the RSS parsing for you. So I'll stick to a no-frills approach to RSS reading for this example.

The app will connect to a RSS feed by using a Flex 2 HTTPService object. A real application might want to connect to more than one remote service, and I want to make sure that the same pattern is used for each one. In addition, it would be nice to define one standard way of handling faults when remote service calls fail. This calls for a separate class or component to manage all of the remote services for the app.