A new Flex container has been added to FlexLib, called the WindowShade. This container shows a header button above or below the content of the container. Clicking the header button opens or closes the panel. This lets you easily create expandable panels in your Flex applications. A single WindowShade container can be used on its own, or you can place a few of them in a VBox to make something similar to an Accordion, except you can have multiple children open at once (similar to Peter Ent’s stack components).

The component was contributed by Dave Glasser, of iDashboards. I initially went back and forth with Dave about the component. At first I thought this was really trying to be an accordion component with multiple open children, in which case I figured if we were going to do that component we should do it right (maybe extend Accordion). But I’ve since been won over to the usefulness of a single WindowShade container, and in my latest project I even used it – 3 times 🙂 So I worked with Dave and we reworked the component a bit, and now I think it’s pretty nifty.

Here’s an example that uses LinkButtons for the headers. You can use any Button control (ie Button, LinkButton, CanvasButton).

As a side note, I also contributed a fix from Troy Gilbert that lets you use a CanvasButton in a Repeater. Thanks Troy!