A Little Help with some Simple Actionscript

[William Spence]

I am using a Flex MobileGrid to display some real estate date in a mobile app. Unfortunately, if the columns contain too much information, they do not automatically truncate the column to ellipsis "..." As a result, I am trying to write an ActionScript ItemRenderer to help with this and am having no success. I am a MXML programmer for the most part, and use actionscript for program logic, but I am not very good with creating my own ActionScript classes. I will list my ActionScript ItemRenderer here. Please let me know if you see anything that would help me to get the ellipsis "..." that I am hoping for. Thanks!

package renderers {

    import flashx.textLayout.formats.LineBreak;
    import spark.components.itemRenderers.MobileGridTextCellRenderer;

        public class mobileGridRenderer extends MobileGridTextCellRenderer{

        public function mobileGridRenderer() {
            super();
            multiline = false;
            lineBreak = LineBreak.EXPLICIT;
            truncateToFit("...");
        }
    }
}

[William Spence]

I know this is basic stuff for most of you, but I thought I would add it for anybody who may have a similar problem. I got the item renderer to work by adding the following code:

override public function set data(value:Object):void{
    super.data = value;



    width = AppVars.appWidth * .4;
    multiline = false;
    lineBreak = LineBreak.EXPLICIT;
    truncateToFit("...");
}

Apparently, it is important to wait until the "data" has changed before you take the actions to truncate the text, but you also have to set a width for the StyleableTextField that is the basis of the itemrenderer for the truncateToFit method to work properly. The thing that I cannot figure out is why I have to calculate a width the way that I have done above instead of getting it from the MobileGrid that the itemrenderer works on. I would think width=this.width, or width = parent.width, or width = owner.width or something along these lines would work, but I was sadly disappointed. In other words, I have to write a different itemrenderer for every column that I want to truncate because I cannot get the width of the column from within the itemrenderer.

Any thoughts on how I might effectively get the width of the column from within the itemrenderer so that I can apply it to the width of the StyleableTextField so that it will truncate at the appropriate place in the string???