Towards the end of last week I spent quite a lot of time working with customisations of the ComboBox in Flex 2 for work, and it was really beginning to bug me how when I typed to select an item, the selection was only ever the first item that matched the letter I was typing. Having had it become second nature, since it’s a feature of my browser of choice Firefox, that I can type the beginning of a word to jump to an option (e.g. "United K" to jump to "United Kingdom" in a list of countries) I now really missed it when using Flex.
I didn’t have time to look at a work around during work hours as it really isn’t a feature that is needed of our product, just something that annoyed me. So I decided that I would quickly knock a solution together at the weekend and then write up a short post of how it was done, in case other people wanted to find out how to do it.
However it didn’t quite work out that way.
After a few frustrating hours I managed to get a fully working solution which I thought I’d share. You can read on for the story behind the component, or you can head straight to the FoxyComboBox code page to view the results.
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