Hey Deepa,

Thanks for your response.  This doe work and is very close to what I had in my own testing.

The problem comes when you decide to make a component out of the extended Panel.  You can extend Panel and define your own skinParts for the button, but the partAdd function never fires for the skinParts declared in the parent. 

Panel defines these 2 skin Parts in particular

[SkinPart(required="true")]

public var titleField:SimpleText;

[SkinPart(required="true")]

public var contentGroup:Group;

And I have used the class below to extend Panel and work on my skin.

TitleWindow.as

package view.components

{

import flash.events.Event;

import flash.events.MouseEvent;

import spark.components.Button;

import spark.components.Panel;

import spark.primitives.SimpleText;

[Event(name="close")]

public class TitleWindow extends Panel

{

[SkinPart(required="true")]

public var closeButton:Button;

public function TitleWindow()

{

super();

}

override protected function partAdded(partName:String, instance:Object) : void

    {

        super.partAdded(partName, instance);

        if ( partName == "closeButton" ) {

        Button(instance).addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onCloseClick);

        }

        if ( partName == "titleField" ) {

        SimpleText(titleField).text = title;

        }

    }

    protected function onCloseClick(event:MouseEvent) : void

    {

    dispatchEvent(new Event("close") );

    }

    override public function set title(value:String) : void

    {

    super.title = value;

    if ( titleField ) {

    titleField.text = value;

    }

    }

}

}

TitleWindowSkin.as

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<s:Skin xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/halo" xmlns:default="spark.skins.default.*">

<fx:Script>

<![CDATA[

import spark.primitives.SimpleText;

import spark.components.Group;

public function get contentGroup():Group {

return p.contentGroup;

}

public function get titleField():SimpleText {

return p.titleField;

}

]]>

</fx:Script>

<s:states>

<mx:State name="normal" />

</s:states>

<default:PanelSkin id="p" top="0" bottom="0" left="0" right="0" />

<s:Button id="closeButton" skinClass="view.skins.CloseButtonSkin" right="10" top="{p.titleField.height/3}" />

</s:Skin>

In the code above the partAdd if block for titleField never gets called. 

Any clue on how I can get the skinAdd method to execute for skinParts declared in the parent object?

Thanks, it was great seeing you again at FlashCamp.

=Sim

Hi gjastrab

Thanks for your comments.  I think you are wrong though, and it goes back to something Deepa and I talked about at FlashCamp.

I understand that it is not the intended behaviour to extend and existing skin through inheritience. I don't have a problem with that which is why I created a new skin and included the panelskin inside thereby creating a new skin and using the old skin through composition.

However to think that I could not extend panel to add behaviors just seems wrong.  I understand that the lifecycle of a skin as that it should not be extended. But even if I created my skin completely from scratch I would still be extending Panel to get the built in behavours.  I have done this with buttons and other classes with no problem.

The real issue is about wether or not the partAdd method should be called for skinParts that are defined in the parent.  And I think this may be a bug. In our discussion last week, Deepa mentioned that the bug may already be fixed so I am just looking for confirmation on that.

Thanks again for your comments though.

simeon