flex chat/telnet application send/receive same window in TextArea

Question

Hi there, Just wanting to know if anybody has seen an example of a telnet/chat or other console like FLEX application where you can use the same TextArea as input/ouput area.

I've been trying to modify the app at:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/17_Networking_and_communications_8.html

but so far, computer says no.

All the implementations I've seen use a combination of TextInput and TextArea.

The challenge is that we'll be using this app to telnet into some old routers and we'll need to do a fair amount of copy/pasting. Based on what I've seen, it seems that I would need to point the mouse into the TextInput in order to be able to right click and paste, which is not very sleak.....

Your thoughts, Fran

Answer 1

edit Just realized that I had trimmed out what was directly pertaining to the question: I was unable to find anything that used the TextArea for input and output; see the below suggestions if custom-component suggestions are ok.

The TextArea component only fires a change event whenever a user adds input. Whenever you set the text field programmatically, a change event does not fire--you could maybe use that as a way to know what is user input and console "responses" by looking for carriage-returns (\r).

I'm unsure if you have a requirement to maintain the user's input at the bottom-most line (like a console), even after the console responds with something like auto-complete. If that's the case, then something a bit more complex would have to come into play (such as remembering where the user's input started/ended) or the requirement of a single-component console needs to be reconsidered--sleek is nice, but not always necessary.