Flex: Storing custom user strings in controls

Few days back while I was programming on Flex this cool problem came through. Problem was that I created buttons dynamically in the code based on some parameters passed to the function. These parameters would decide the label, id and color of the button. In addition to this there was an information called category which had a contextual meaning to the project I was working on. So it went something like this – 

private function InitializeAndDisplayButton(id:String, label:String, category:String)
{
var b:Button = new Button(); 
b.id = id; 
b.label = label; 
b.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, buttonHandler);
}

private function buttonHandler(event:Event):void
{
var id:String = event.currentTarget.id; 
/* how do I access “category” here */
} 

Now the problem, how do you store the category for each button so that in the button handler you access it through the event? 

Solution I

A naive solution came to mind that I can keep a private map (flash.utils.Dictionary) between id and the category and add an entry corresponding to each id in the function InitializeAndDisplayButton and access it in buttonHandler after extracting “id”. 

Solution II – (topic of this post) 

Another solution is a cool one certainly. Function “SetStyle” takes two parameters and stores them as key-value pairs. We can use this to store any custom user strings (data) in controls. e.g. we can add following line in InitializeAndDisplayButton – 

b.setStyle(“ButtonCategory”, category); 

and access it with following code in function buttonHandler

var id:String = event.currentTarget.getStyle(“ButtonCategory”); 

This looks cool to me! 😀 

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