Comments on: Followup about Flex Panel bug

By: Harry B. Garland

Harry B. Garland — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:30:48 +0000

Adobe just released Flex SDK 3.1 and it has lots of bug fixes. This Panel bug (which I filed) is still marked as open, and it is scheduled for fix in Flex SDK 3.2. Perhaps I could have got it fixed faster. My first mistake was not having a blog, and my second mistake was not posting an entry that includes “Calling bullshit” with a link to the bug.

It is interesting to see all the activity that has happened in the comments of this bug:
https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14806

Deepa is awesome for dealing with this bug/controversy in stride. I know that Flex 4 will have a killer solution because these kinds of components will be rewritten from the ground up, and extend SkinnableComponent, with a completely different paradigm for skinning. I’m looking forward to this!

By: Bill Chalmers

Bill Chalmers — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:08:54 +0000

This bug has been a pain for me, but I found a workaround that works for me, I have been using some themes from scalenine and was getting the panel border overlay problem, then I opened the css file found the declaration for the Panel and changed it to PanelSkin and this seemed to fix it.

1. Find the declaration for the panel in the css file
2. Change it to PanelSkin instead of Panel.

hope this helps someone else

By: Bjorn Schultheiss

Bjorn Schultheiss — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 06:52:47 +0000

no worries champ.. good to know your still on our side ; )

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:43:04 +0000

@Bjorn: Aha, that’s kinda funny. That’s actually a different bug that the one I posted. That one has to do specifically with using image assets for the skins and a scale-nine grid. The saddest part about this bug is that according to a commenter, the code specifically produced by the official Adobe Flex component kit for Flash doesn’t work. Woops. Anyway, I had no idea that this was also a bug in the Panel skin stuff, since I rarely use scale-nine image assets as my Panel skins.

“Flex’s Lil John had been intimidated into submission”

Ha, I love it. Fuck that. But I do think it’s important for everyone to get along. In my view, I said some pissy things, they responded, corrected the problem, so I was happy and gave them a teddy bear. Isn’t that the way the world is supposed to work?

If only this other scale-nine panel bug affected me I would’ve had a whole other blog post I could’ve written.

By: Bjorn Schultheiss

Bjorn Schultheiss — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:33:08 +0000

Check this out..
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-14806

Adobe supplied the same reasoning again;

From the contrast of your posts.. “Calling bullshit on a “resolved” Flex bug” to “OK, everyone feeling all warm and fuzzy inside” I thought the Flex’s Lil John had been intimidated into submission…

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:19:39 +0000

@Bjorn- I don’t think I was “silenced” at all. In fact, the opposite. Matt Chotin responded with a post of his own giving us all a look into the Flex team’s bug management strategy and explaining things from his point of view. And the bug got fixed (as far as I know) before the final release of Flex 3. I’m sure there are still many other bugs in the final Flex 3 release (I know I’ve already run into a bunch). But in this instance I bitched about a bug, Adobe responded both with an explanatory blog post and with a source code bug fix, and then I posted a followup to let people know and to thank the Flex team for being open and having the conversation.

They didn’t send a bag of money or dudes with baseball bats to break my legs.

By: Bjorn Schultheiss

Bjorn Schultheiss — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 02:09:30 +0000

Wow!

I’ve finally just read this and i can’t believe it!

Your previous article was beautiful… Supporting the community.. yet you were silenced..

Bugs made the Flex 3 release, causing developers pain around the world, and your quoted in this article praising the Team that did this…

IMO, they deserved strong worded criticism.

By: Lam Do

Lam Do — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 08:27:48 +0000

This bug is still available on Flex 3. I have changed the skin of the Panel by using Flash Component’s toolkit, then imported into Flex by using Flex Import Skin wizard. Then I placed the datagrid inside this panel content. I also set the datagrid’s width and height to 100%. Now the datagrid overlapped the panel content.

One more things about this bug. When adding the Control Bar, the control bar background does not appear. I thought I was wrong when changing the skin, but it’s still happen even I used the original skin template.

By: Harry

Harry — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 02:53:20 +0000

The padding-{left,right,bottom} all work the same as padding-top for scale9′ing it.

But now I just found another problem. If you extend a panel, the padding-* styles become impotent. In other words, if you create an mxml like this:

then, instantiate that panel from another component, the blue box will overlay the panel title, regardless of whether or not there’s a padding-top. but if you use the same code by pasting it directly into another component, it works fine.

it seems like adobe made some drastic changes between the last beta and the release, and they didn’t have time to test every aspect of it. now, i’m spending my time dealing with this problem that they introduced instead of moving forward building my flex application, which was working fine before somebody pressured adobe into making a risky change at the last minute.

now, i gotta find a way to extend the panel so that its children won’t overlap the title when the extended panel is extended with children. or i’ll instruct all the flex developers to put a canvas with left,right,top,bottom tags into every instance of panel. this is ugly. what other options do i have?

By: Samuel Wan

Samuel Wan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:30:52 +0000

I just used a Canvas as the content of the Panel, and put the original content inside the canvas. Then, I just set the canvas’ left, bottom, right, and bottom properties to match the scale nine dimensions. There’s probably a more convenient and automatic workaround along this direction, but it worked in a pinch for me.