FAQ.You Can't Do That

Here's an (obviously incomplete) list of things you can't do with flex. Sorry. But at least now you can stop searching.

1. Browse, Access or Load a file directly from the local hard drive or file system without using flash.net.FileReference or FileReferenceList and bouncing the file off the server.

One caveat to this. Flex can't do this alone, but A Java applet or ActiveX control can...and these controls can talk to javascript on the web page...and the javascript on the webpage can talk to Flex using flash.net. Here's code to do it.

2. Import an Excel File.

See above, although Excel data can be copied and pasted. When a user copies data out of Excel, the clipboard receives the tab delimited transformation of the copied cells.

3. Extend the Graphics Class.

Flash.Display.Graphics is marked final so you can't override it. You can wrap it in another class. Example forthcoming.

4. Draw Text without using a flash.text.TextField or flash.text.StaticText.

These are all you have (all mx controls use these text controls to render text).

5. Change the appearance of the caret in a TextField.

There are various workarounds to this. Toggling the editable or enabled property will revert the caret back to a mouse pointer, but then you can't select text. You could always put a mouse enabled UIComponent over the TextField and programmatically process the mouse events of the UIComponent to select the TextField using the location of the mouse and TextField.getCharAtPoint().

6. Change the color indicating selected text.

7. Call super.super (the grandparent class)

8. Multiple Inheritance

Some people disagree with me on this one. Here's the best proposed method I've seen.

9. Overload Operators or Methods.

10. Determine the parameters to be used for a web service using the mx.rpc.WebService or mx.rpc.mxml.WebService. (Reference)