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I have been working with tlf from adobe for quite some time. While building a chat application I had to overcome some small glitches, such as being able to use the GIFPlayer/GIFReader (http://www.bytearray.org/?p=95) for displaying animated gif, and recently being able to copy the underlineing text from an emoticon/InlineGraphicElement.

Every chat app has some type emoticons feature, and with that feature comes being able to copy the underlining text. Well with using the InlineGraphicElement class you can’t do so ( the .text attribute is declared protected and theirs no way to extend InlineGraphicElement since its declared final). So I took it upon myself to devise some short of hack to get this working, by using the “name” property on the InlineGraphicElement.source, an o so simple fix but required the change of 4 different classes and may break with feature release ( using the 1.0 595 (738907) from the flex 4 release)

A breakdown on changed classes

• com.conceptualideas.chat.conversion
• ExtendedPlainTextExporter.as
• Extends flashx.textLayout.conversions.PlainTextExporter
• Overrides exportTOString(source:TextFlow):String, which is a direct copy injecting our InlineGraphicElement check
• com.conceptualideas.chat.edit
• ExtendedSelectionManager.as
• Extends flashx.textLayout.edit.SelectionManager
• Overrides public function editHandler(event:Event):void
• Applys an case for Event.COPY which will inject our custom ExtendedCopyOperation
• ExtendedTextClipboard.as
• Extends flashx.textLayout.edit.TextClipboard
• Overrides tlf_internal static function createPlainTextExportString(scrap:TextScrap):String
• Injects our custom ExtendedPlainTextExporter
• com.conceptualideas.operations
• ExtendedCopyOperation.as
• Extends flashx.textLayout.operations.CopyOperation
• Overrides public function doOperation():Boolean
• Injects our ExtendedTextClipboard class

Execution Flow

• TextFlow->InteractiveManager(ExtendedSelectionManager) ->editHandler -> When Event.COPY is being handle ->
• Flush Operations and create a new ExtendedCopyOperation
• Our ISelectionManager( ExtendedSelectionManager) will call doOperation ( withen editHandler) to process the operation
• ISelectionManger.doOperation will invoke ExtendedCopyOperation.doOperation which will copy the current selection using the new ExtendedTextClipboard class
• ExtendedTextClipboard.createPlainTextExportString will replace “plainTextExporter” with our ExtendedPlainTextExporter
• ExtendedPlainTextExporter.exportToString(source:TextFlow), this is were the real work happens we will translate the “name” and do a bit of checking ( which holds our textRepresentation for this InlineGraphicElement)

Notes:
One would think that we could use InlineGraphicElement.tlf_internal::getBlockElement().userData, but it seems that the tlf will erase this on next “modelChange” pass ( atleast I think this is where it happens, couldn’t see where FlowLeafElement.tlf_internal::releaseContentElement() was being called, in any case one would still have to edit the current TextClipboard implementation for this to work off the ‘userData’

Links
Demo ( source view )
Classes ( download )
Bug Ticket