Styling both foreground and background selection color in a Flex list/datagrid

Question

Flex exposes a "selectionColor" CSS property for styling the background color of a selected list/datagrid. However, I cannot figure out how to style the foreground or text color of selected list. It appears you can only change the foreground color for all rows.

So, for example, that I wanted a very dark selection background color and a very light deselected background color. You would similarly want a light text color for selection and a dark text color for deselected.

I know I could do this with a custom item renderer, but that seems rather silly. The point is to style all lists/datagrids in my app. I don't want to have to set a custom item renderer or extend Datagrid for each place I use it. Note that I am using Flex 4 and am willing to use skins though I don't know if that means anything considering DataGrid is not sparkified yet.

Answer 1

Flex 3 used textRollOverColor and textSelectedColor but Flex 4 components does not support them anymore.

The following example demonstrates all this + adding support for this colors for spark List:

<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
    xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" 
    xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx">

    <fx:Style>
        @namespace s "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark";
        @namespace mx "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx";

        global
        {
            textRollOverColor: yellow;
            textSelectedColor: green;
        }

    </fx:Style>

    <fx:Script>
    <![CDATA[
        import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;

        private function getListDataProvider():ArrayCollection
        {
            return new ArrayCollection([ "Item 1", "Item 2", "Item 3"]);
        }

        private function getGridDataProvider():ArrayCollection
        {
            return new ArrayCollection([ { name: "Item 1" }, { name: "Item 2" }, { name: "Item 3" } ]);
        }

    ]]>
    </fx:Script>

    <s:layout>
        <s:VerticalLayout horizontalAlign="center" verticalAlign="middle"/>
    </s:layout>

    <s:List dataProvider="{getListDataProvider()}"/>

    <s:List dataProvider="{getListDataProvider()}" itemRenderer="ColoredItemRenderer"/>

    <mx:List dataProvider="{getListDataProvider()}"/>

    <mx:DataGrid dataProvider="{getGridDataProvider()}"/>

</s:Application>

ColoredItemRenderer:

<s:ItemRenderer xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
    xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" 
    xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx" 
    autoDrawBackground="true">

    <fx:Script>
    <![CDATA[

        override protected function updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void
        {
            super.updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);

            var color:uint;
            if (selected)
                color = getStyle("textSelectedColor");
            else if (hovered)
                color = getStyle("textRollOverColor");
            else
                color = getStyle("color");
            sparkLabel.setStyle("color", color);
        }

    ]]>
    </fx:Script>

    <s:Label id="sparkLabel" text="{data}"/>

</s:ItemRenderer>