Can I suspend drawing to perform multiple successive updates in Flex?

Question

I've written a simple calendar control to allow for selecting single days, weeks, months and so on. The simplicity comes from the fact that I don't really do any drawing myself, opting instead to create a bunch of boxes and labels to act as date cells for the calendar.

When a date or a date range is selected, I need to highlight that range. It's easily done by iterating through the cells and switching their style. [edit:] However, this seems to cause a delay during which the cells are first drawn as if the style name was blank, and then re-drawn with the correct style, despite the fact that I never explicitly set the style to null -- I alternate between "CalendarCell" and "CalendarCellSelected".

If this were Windows Forms, I'd call SuspendLayout on the parent container to make sure the controls are repainted only after I've finished the updates. What I'm looking to know is whether or not a similar solution exists for Flex. I'd like to avoid drawing the entire calendar "manually", so to speak, if that's at all possible.

edit: changed the problem description to more accurately reflect what I'm seeing.

Answer 1

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but David Coletta at Adobe has posted a video explaining an EventCoalescer that they use in Buzzword for deferring events that update specific areas of the app UI until the user has stopped moving the insertion point in the text, for example.

This blog post by Hans Van de Velde also has a similar solution, and actual code for it as well.

Answer 2

Are you using callLater() at all?

If you use callLater() it may impove your visuals as it batches up changes until it needs to draw a frame or you force a frame draw with validateNow() or similar. It might be enough in your case.

Answer 3

Is your calendar control a UIComponent? Is it using the standard invalidation methods like commitProperties(), updateDisplayList(), etc?

What you might want to do is keep a private array of the cells that will have their styles changed, but then do the actual style switching in your commitProperties() override. I'm just not sure if setStyle() fires an validateNow() because the flickering is a bit surprising.