How can I extract all default skins / styles / icons etc. from my Flex app?

Question

I'm developing a Flex application. Since I'm not a very talented graphical designer, I leave all stylings etc. at their defaults. Once I finish the app, I would like to give it to a graphical designer, together with all the fonts, icons, styles etc. that Flex has put into my app, so she can swap them out and make my app pretty and theme it to my CI.

Also, I'd like to use this approach as the foundation for interchangeable themes at a later stage.

There's two parts to my question, really:

a) how do I get all the assets that are used in my app (not simply all that the Flex framework has bundled) extracted, and

b) how do I figure out which asset is used in which place, so the designer doesn't have to guess and reverse engineer.

There's a third part (how do I repackage the assets to make them swappable at run / compile time), but I think I know how that works, roughly.

Answer 1

I don't believe you can do that. You will have to set up skinning yourself. The default graphics used in the components are built into the flex framework and generated at runtime using the drawing api instead of embedding graphics.

Your best bet is going to be to use css and a graphics framework that supports skinning like degrafa ( http://www.degrafa.org/ ).

If you want to check out the code that generates the base skin for flex 3.x you can have a look in the svn repo here - http://opensource.adobe.com/svn/opensource/flex/sdk/trunk/frameworks/projects/halo/