ToggleOnClick doen't work right

Question

I am using a ToggleButtonBar with the toggleOnClick property
set to "true".
The problem is, that once I unselect the first Button by
clicking, I am not able to select it again, until I select the
other one.
Any ideas?
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="
http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
layout="absolute">
<mx:ToggleButtonBar toggleOnClick="true">
<mx:dataProvider>
<mx:Array>
<mx:Object label="a"/>
<mx:Object label="b"/>
</mx:Array>
</mx:dataProvider>
</mx:ToggleButtonBar>
</mx:Application>
Thanks!

Answer 1

I just ran into this issue myself.
In my opinion, the feature *does* behave as
documented--however, that behavior is not what's desired in many
cases. It sounds like both hupfnudel and I want the user to be able
to select any button in the bar (this works as documented and
desired). The user should be able to click whatever button is
currently selected, which will cause the button to deselect,
leaving no selected buttons (also works). In many applications, the
user (and developer) would expect that the user could click that
same item again to re-select it. This part doesn't work. If you
click a button that you previously deselected, you cannot reselect
it again until you first select some other item. To put it another
way, you can deselect the last-touched item, but you cannot select
it.
For better or for worse, the current behavior is how the
documentation reads, I believe. It states that the toggleOnClick
property "Specifies whether the currently selected button can be
deselected by the user." It does not say anything about
re-selecting the item.
I found that I could get the desired behavior in my
application by adding a itemClick event handler, and in that
handler looking at the value of:
var selected:Boolean =
Button(event.target.getChildAt(event.index)).selected
then i do:
if (selected == false && theCurrentValue == -1) {
Button(this.choicesButtons.getChildAt(event.index)).selected
= true
You may be wondering what "theCurrentValue" is above. In my
app, I am using databinding to bind the selectedIndex of the button
bar. So, this assumes that in the mxml, you have
selectedIndex="{theCurrentValue}". If you are doing that, then
replace theCurrentValue above with whatever you are binding the
selectedIndex to. If you are not using databinding, then you'll
have to change the strategy a little bit. Unfortunately you can't
look at whether the selectedIndex is -1 because the index hasn't
been updated to -1 yet at the time that the itemClick event fires.
I'm sure that there would be a way to do a very simple
extension of ToggleButtonBar that also includes a retoggleOnClick
attribute, and if that was true then logic similar to the above
would be used. For reasons specific to my app I can't do that, so I
am sticking to this somwhat hacky solution, which I'll need to add
for each button bar that I want to get this behavior. No biggie in
this case.
Hope that helps someone in the future.
nate