Globally setting the alpha for disabled components (Both MX and Spark)

Question

I would like my application to show every disabled UIComponent on stage with a certain amount of alpha on it.

I believe the default value is .5 and this makes some of the fields quite unreadable. Reducing it to .3 should fix my problem.

• For Spark components, I know I can create a custom skin and edit the alpha.disabled. But I don't want to do this for 30+ components just for the sake of an alpha style property

• Setting disabledOverlayAlpha will only work on containers, and I need something that actually will work on components at the lowest level of the dislay hierarchy. If I'm not mistaken this is only available for mx components.

What would be the pragmatic way to go in order to make all UIComponents show the same amount of alpha on disabling them?

Cheers

Answer 1

Not the prettiest solution, but it's the only thing I could come up with that does what you ask for any UIComponent:

• Listen to Event.ADDED on the stage, so you catch every component that is added to the displayList.
• Start listening for "enabledChanged" on the event's target (which is the component that was just added). "enabledChanged" is dispatched by UIComponent when its enabled property changes.
• Set the alpha of the component that fires this event.
• Also don't forget to clean up those event listeners when the component is removed from the stage or you'll get serious performance issues.
• For Spark components you'll probably have to override the Skin's default disabled alpha value somehow. This may require listening for the skin's StateChangeEvent.CURRENT_STATE_CHANGE.

Yuck! I hope I'm overlooking a simpler option. Otherwise I'd probably just go for creating all the Spark skins, perhaps with an additional style for the disabled alpha value so that you can set it globally in the future.