Question

I’m in the process of designing a Flash application, and it requires either two or three pieces of data from the user. The third data element is only relevant if one of the other elements has changed from the default value.

In order to prevent the user from inputting information that would skew the calculations based on the input, how can I gray out the text input box if the default conditional is unchanged? I could embed a conditional to ignore the input from that particular box, but I know that some users will fill in all data fields regardless of on-screen instructions.

Answer 1

Just use the Event.CHANGE listener + handler to check the condition/state of elements. This event is fired every single time the user alters a component. For example, heres a text input doing this:

var tf:TextInput = new TextInput();

var someOtherObject:Button = new Button();

tf.x = 100;
tf.y = 100;
tf.width = 150;

stage.addChild(tf);
stage.addChild(someOtherObject);

tf.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, onFormChanged);

private function onFormChanged(e:Event):void
{
   switch(e.currentTarget){
      case tf:
         //Do your conditional checks here.
         if(tf.text.toString().length < 10){
             someOtherObject.enabled = false;
             someOtherObject.text = "";
             someOtherObject.maxChars = 0;
         }else{
             someOtherObject.maxChars = 100;
         }
      break;

      case someOtherObject:

      break;
   }
}

So basically, as the user types into tf, I’m making sure they have entered at least 10 characters. If they were to meet the condition, and then erase a character, the event would be fired again, and the condition would not be met, so someOtherObject is disabled.