On change: (Flex Properties)

Question

I'd like to know how to use this. I've set an input text field with initial text with a style of italics, I'd like to have it change to normal when the user enters new text. I can't find anything to explain the proper syntax, and what I'm doing doesn't work:
change="text.normal"
I find the Flex help completely mystifying. I click on the Help button; I perform searches; I get nothing. It is this way for every single question. I must presume that this help system has the answers if I can only find the secret password. If someone has succeeded in finding the answer using help, I'd appreciate hearing how they did it.

Answer 1

Hello Thomas,
Listening for a change event is not really ok because if I'm not mistaking, a change event is triggered even if the user types someting into the TextInput( and you don't want events to trigger on every character you type into the field; except, if that's the purpose of your application ). A much cleaner approach would be to listen for focusIn and focusOut events and combine these with a custom TextFormat object.
http://www.igorcosta.com/flex3/doc/flash/text/TextFormat.html
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=Working_with_Text_12.html
You would be doing something like this:
Create a TextFormat object that will handle the text formatting from "normal" to "italic".
Add a focusIn and focusOut listener to your TextInput.
When the user focuses the input field then inside the focusIn handler, simply apply the correct TextFormat to your TextInput( in this case, you'd be applying a format that will display the text the user enters as "italic" ).
When the TextInput looses focus then inside the focusOut handler you'd apply the TextFormat object again, but this time, without italic, causing your text to display as "normal text" once more.
Simple and more efficient than trying to do the same thing with a change event.
Best regards,
Barna Biro