DateChooser with support for backgroundColoring some dates

I got a query recently asking whether it is possible to have the DateChooser highlight certain special dates with a different background color. The query was accompanided by a DateChooser code which achieved this by using the TexField.backgroud and TexField.backgroudColor properties (similar to my other posts for DG row background coloring). But the draw back of the approach was that selection and roll over feedback was not working.

I took a look at DateChooser and CalendarLayout and realized that with the current design/implmentation it was not possible to add the backgroundColor support. The selection and rollOver indicators were lower in z order than date UITextFields.

I modified the CalenderLayout code to have three layers (UIComponents). One for background, second for indicators and third one for the dates. After modifying the addChild* and removeChild calls refer to the appropriate layers, the remaining work was to add "speicalDates" and "specialDatesColor" property and wire them up at appropirate places (commitProperties and updateDisplayList) to achive the following result :

I have randomnly generated the special dates in the above sample to keep the sample live on any day it is viewed!

I have added a alpha value of 0.7 in DateChooserIndicator to make the selection indicator show through the backgroundColor. Feel free to tweak this value to your flavor.

The project source to build the Flex3Ex.swc is here. It contains the modified DateChooser and CalendarLayout classes. I posted the complete Flex project here because Travis pointed out that it is difficult for newbies to understand how to use the component source files. Thanks Travis!

The source for the sample app is here.

The components can be further enhanced to support multiple specialDates (array of array of dates) and multiple specialDatesColors.

Update: I got to implement this. Source is available here.

Update: I have updated the source to support the following:

Now dates can be specified as strings "06/01/2009" (for 1st June 2009) but make sure that it succeeds to pass through Date.parse function and returns a valid Date.

Date ranges can be specified as follows:

{ rangeStart:"06/01/2009", rangeEnd:"06/05/2009" }

Update: There seems to be some problem with library path handling etc due to which a swc is not getting picked up properly in FB. The work around I came up for this is to include the Flex3Ex/src directory in the source path of the project as shown here

Extending DateChooser.selectableRange to accept multiple values/ranges

Recently I came across the following requirement: Enable few disjoint dates in a DateChooser for user selection. The default DateChooser.selectableRange does not allow inserting of list of dates. It takes only a range and disables the rest.

I copied and modified the Flex 2 DateChooser control to achive the new functionlity. The swc is available here http://sreenivas.ramaswamy.googlepages.com/FlexEx2.swc.

I used this file to do the testing. I have done basic testing and it seems to work.

Only few dates in Jan, Feb and March of 2008 are enabled and it restircts the navigation to only those months

Currently I have made changes to only Flex 2 DateChooser. I would be happy to fix any bugs found !

Here are the Flex 3 files: DateChooser and CalenderLayout. The project source to build a Flex3Ex SWC which contains the modified code for DateChooser and CalendarLayout can be found here.