I’m posting this Flash problem more for my own future reference, but perhaps someone else will benefit.

Basically I’m generally wary of using the built-in Flash components, for whenever I get one working, I develop some bugs that have me wondering if I should have created something from scratch. My experience with the “ComboBox” component was no different.

The “ComboBox” is a drop down menu that you can fill with your own list. The user can pick an option and you get the data out.

After I got it working I realized it was breaking some buttons I had already created, but in a fairly subtle way. Say you have a button that the user can click on repeatedly, as in a number increment or in my case, a “next” button for an image gallery. The way it should work is the user can click on the button a ton of times in sequence without having to move the mouse.

But when combobox is activated, this behavior breaks. Meaning, in the example below, the button works as described above - until the user clicks on the ComboBox. Then the arrow buttons don’t work quite right. You have to move the mouse a little in order to reactive the button once you click on it.

Because the behavior changes after touching the ComboBox, I was pretty sure the component was the culprit. After doing some searching online, I found this fix at Jetfly (which in turn points to this fix at PhilterBlog ) where I learned of a “focus management” that the ComboBox takes a hold of, and is what causes the other buttons to change their behavior. You can return the focus to the buttons using something like:

next_btn.onPress = function(){
Selection.setFocus(this);
};

Great, this solves the button bug… but then Flash draws a yellow box around the buttons, for “keyboard focus”.

More searching revealed a property I never heard of called “_focusrect“, that you can use to turn off the yellow box:

next_btn.onPress = function(){
this._focusrect = false;
Selection.setFocus(this);
};

Unwanted behavior eliminated, and I learned stuff: 1) setFocus and focusrect, 2) reaffirmed my general annoyance with Flash components, and 3) as with most of my Flash problems, someone else has already encountered them and posted fixes online.

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