One of the additions to the Flash MX 2004 documentation that’s new with the 7.2 update is information and a list of steps on how to create a custom theme Defaults class. This is important when creating a new theme and you want to set the defaults for many components, as opposed to just a few style settings.

The complication with Defaults is that it has a reference from FocusRect so you need to provide both the Defaults class and the FocusRect class.

Download the example classes and FLA.

The example includes the two classes, Defaults and FocusRect, along with a FLA that has one component in it to demonstrate that the custom theme is being used.

The custom theme only makes the window title red, and thus could have been easier implemented using setStyle, but it’s meant as an example of creating a custom Defaults class and thus serves that purpose.

The question of plotting a line graph with thousands of data points came up again today. This always puzzled me; if your chart is only 500 pixels wide, why would you try to draw a chart with 1000 points? It would leave only half a pixel for each point. Flash is kewl but it won’t render half pixels and even if it did, rendering 1000 lines in Flash is a little slow.

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