Using Fundamental Controls

There are several fundamental components available in the Flex framework. Starting from UI elements to components, various elements are grouped as fundamental controls.

User Interface Elements

This includes core visual elements the user interacts with and operates upon. Flex provides a huge list of widely used and common elements varying from basic to complex which we will cover in this tutorial.

Layouts: This element defines the way all UI elements should be organized on the screen and provide a final look and feel to the GUI (Graphical User Interface). This part will be covered in Layout chapter.

Behavior: These elements include the events which occur when the user interacts with UI elements. This part will be covered in Event Handling chapter.

Flex UI Elements:

The Flex UI library provides classes in a well-defined class hierarchy to create complex web-based user interfaces. All classes in this component hierarchy has been derived from the EventDispatcher base class as shown below:

Flex Components

Every Basic UI control inherits properties from UIComponent class which in turn inherits properties from EventDispatcher and other top level classes.

Flex EventDispatcher Class

The EventDispatcher class is the base class for all classes that can dispatch events. The EventDispatcher class allows any object on the display list to be an event target and as such, to use the methods of the IEventDispatcher interface.

Flex UIComponent

The UIComponent class is the base class for all visual components, both interactive and noninteractive.

Basic Controls

Label - Label is a low-level UIComponent that can render one or more lines of uniformly formatted text.

Text - The Text control lets you display HTML content as well as normal text in your application.

Image - The Image control lets you import JPEG, PNG, GIF, and SWF files at runtime.

LinkButton - The LinkButton control is a borderless Button control whose contents are highlighted when a user moves the mouse over it.