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When I started using Flex I was lovin it. Now that I’ve used it in depth, I have to say there are lots of things that could be improved. For instance, its comboBox component has no image support. For a xmpp client I’ve worked on recently, I need to make a country picker drop down combo, and it needed to contain country flag image along with the label. Seems like a simple task on the surface, in the backend it’s like flipping the world around. Ok… maybe that’s saying too much. Anyhow, here goes.

ComboBox is works pretty well and serves its primary purpose, but there isn’t much space left in terms of expansion, which I find similar with many of other Flex standard components. For this particular country picker, I ended up making a completely new class component composed of button and floating canvas which served as the drop down list. Once I did that, I had control over what to display on the combo and its list items, which were composed of image and label components. In terms of functionality, the only difference between my combo and Flex’s comboBox was one has small icon image with label for its list items and the other only has label. It’s these small tweaks that Flex isn’t so “flexible” with.