How to add a UI control to an ItemRenderer component

Using a DisplayObjectRecycler, an ItemRenderer component may be customized to display a UI control as an accessory view.

Create the ListView

To start, create a ListView component and pass it a data collection containing some items.

var listView = new ListView();
listView.dataProvider = new ArrayCollection([
    { name: "Volume", accessory: new HSlider() },
    { name: "Enable Music", accessory: new ToggleSwitch() }
]);
listView.itemToText = item -> item.name;
addChild(listView);

The techniques used in this tutorial apply to an ItemRenderer used in any data container — not just ListView. The code shouldn't require more than trivial tweaks for other containers, such as GridView or GroupListView.

Similarly, you should be able to use the same capabilities with HierarchicalItemRenderer in containers like TreeView or TreeGridView.

The itemToText function makes it easy to populate the item renderer's text, but how to display the UI controls stored by the accessory property?

Create the ItemRenderer

By using a DisplayObjectRecycler, we can customize the default ItemRenderer component to display both text and assets.

Call DisplayObjectRecycler.withClass() to create an item renderer.

var recycler = DisplayObjectRecycler.withClass(ItemRenderer);
listView.itemRendererRecycler = recycler;

We don't add the accessory view yet because the creation function doesn't have access to any items from the list view's data provider. That data becomes available later, in the recycler's update function.

Set the accessoryView of the ItemRenderer

In the recycler's update function, we have access to a ListViewItemState object that contains all of the data that we need to populate the item renderer, including the item from the data provider that is storing the UI control.

recycler.update = (itemRenderer:ItemRenderer, state:ListViewItemState) -> {
    itemRenderer.text = state.text;

    var accessoryView = cast(state.data.accessory, DisplayObject);
    itemRenderer.accessoryView = accessoryView;
};

Use the ListViewItemState.data property to access the item from the data provider. Then, pass the UI control to the accessoryView property of the item renderer.

Be sure to set the item renderer's text property too. When you provide a recycler with a custom update function, the text is no longer populated automatically.