[FLEX-23580] Allow ItemRenderer to be set as a style

• Type: Improvement
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Duplicate
• Affects Version/s: Adobe Flex SDK 4.0 (Release)
• Component/s: Spark: DataGroup
• Environment: Language Found: English
• Assignee: Adobe JIRA
• Reporter: Adobe JIRA
• Created: 25/Mar/10 17:48
• Updated: 29/Mar/10 19:36
• Resolved: 29/Mar/10 16:58

Description

I keep hearing of people writing item renderers that extend SkinnableContainer and implement IDataRenderer.

In most cases people are doing this because they want to be able to completely change the look of the application by changing a single CSS file at runtime.

This is somewhat possible now, but if you want to define a different ItemRenderer for a List then you would have to have a different Skin for each item renderer. And since DataGroup is not a SkinnableComponent you can't change the item renderer via CSS unless you extend and implement as mentioned above which adds unneccessary complexity and weight to item renderers.

Some examples:

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2438095#2438095
http://forums.adobe.com/message/2370902#2370902 (Also attached as PDF)

I agree with Ryan's point in the second thread that states ItemRenderer shouldn't extend SkinnableContainer, but think people wouldn't need to do this if they could just set the itemRenderer via CSS at runtime.