If you are displaying a large number of itemRenderers — either in the DataGrid or AdvancedDataGrid — your application's performance may be adversely affected if you do not code these itemRenderers efficiently. Here are some tips that might help:

• Limit the number of columns using itemRenderers. Do you really need to have every column be a custom itemRenderer? Sometimes you do, but is all that glitz overwhelming the user?
• Try not to change the style of the elements in your itemRenderer too frequenty. If you need to switch styles (for instance, green for positive values, red for negative values), consider having two controls preset with those styles and making one visible. Changing styles is one of the more time-consuming tasks in Flex.
• Do not use Containers as the basis for your itemRenderers. Containers have a lot of overhead. They are fine for limited use, but it would be more efficient to write your itemRenderers based on UIComponent.

This series includes the following articles:

• Part 1: Inline renderers
• Part 2: External renderers
• Part 3: Communication
• Part 4: States and transitions
• Part 5: Efficiency

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Flex Builder 3

• Try
• Buy

Prerequisites:

To benefit most from this article, it is best if you are familiar with Flex Builder and ActionScript 3.0.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

Page 1 of 4

Next Page

About the author