Conditionally Colored Flex Charts - simplified

Monday, July 14, 2008 by jwopitz | 2 Comments

[Another quick note to myself]

I have always thought of flex developers as being categorized in two camps (at least this has been my experience).  You have the:

• those who focus on mostly Flex charting and
• those who focus on everything but Flex charting.

I fall into the latter category.  I just never decided to look into charts.  Everytime I would take a peek at the API I would just shake my head in confusion and focus on other tasks.  Why learn something new today that you can put off till tomorrow (or however that saying goes).  Well a client wants charts and I am the only Flex developer on the project.

Here is a basic breakdown of what the UI is expected to have:

• comparative data showing columns, each column representing an individual item of like-type.
• unique colors per item.
• color will also indicate some status compared to a benchmark indicator.

The idea is to achieve something like this:

Whoo hoo, big deal.  Just another column chart.  Anywho…. so the issue was I was trying to find a way to easily color the columns based on certain conditions ergo a conditionally colored column chart.

I ran across this post (link) where someone had created a ChartItemRenderer subclass.  It seems to work brilliantly, but I had to question if there was not some simpler means to do so.  After much poking around I did indeed find it.  Check out mx:ColumnSeries.fillFunction (link).

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