Does the Flex rich text control have any practical value?

Question

Since the control emits bizzare non-standard HTML, I'm wondering if it has any practical value.

The control emits font tags!

How are others dealing with it? Do you do some sort of RegEx replace on the text?

Or am I missing something?

Answer 1

Does it have a value? Yes. Is it practical? That depends. How much work are you willing to do to get something useful out of it?

I had to use the RTC to create a chat window for a chat app that was built on Jabber. I wound up having to parse every line of every chat message, check its textwidth, GREP out the bogus HTML (TextFormat and Font tags) while leaving the styling tags (bold, italic, etc.) then shift it onto a queue that would scroll upwards as new messages were sent and received. I had to keep an onscreen buffer of 200 of these lines (taking care not to delete partial messages at the end of the queue). I also had to plot where the emoticons — :) ;) :-) and the like — were located, find out their exact locations, and then draw the emoticon images onto a sync-scrolled Canvas that exactly matched the position of the chat output window. All this while keeping the text selectable and letting people copy and paste it, complete with emoticon tokens that reverted to whatever text smiley upon pasting into the input field.

Was this a lot of work? You bet it was. Was the product ultimately useful? I like to think so. It was pretty cool, in fact. And as it was one of the first Flex projects I ever worked on, it taught me a lot.

Do I wish Adobe supported real, non-gimped HTML? Absolutely.

Short answer: Getting something out of the RTC is a bitch, but probably still faster than doing anything similarly useful in Java or C++. YMMV.