Note: an updated version can be found here, which only has the relevant stuff if you're trying to figure out how to do this.

After a short hiatus succeeding my random anti-RIAA rant, I'm back with some information on an interesting Flex issue that I had.

Flex is the new(ish) Adobe tool that lets you develop flash-like applications in a new way. It's Actionscript based, but has a more web development feel to it than the Flash applications of yore. Unfortunately, though, being a new language, it's lacking a lot. And I mean a lot.

Recently, I was tasked with augmenting an application that we have where I work. It's an image gallery, which reads lists of files fed to it via XML and displays everything. It used a flex stylesheet (which is mostly CSS, with some extra proprietary stuff mixed in), which is all good and dandy- except that it didn't change depending on theme. And, since we have several websites that are the same, with different styles applied, the image gallery looked the same, whether or not it matched. So, my job was to take this flex doodad and spice it up, so it could change depending on theme.

My first thought was "this can't be too bad, it uses these CSS-like sheets, I can just reference externally." Well, this wasn't quite true. I Googled around a bit, to no avail; so, my next step was to check the new version, Flex 3. What I had was Flex 2, and lo and behold, Flex 3 claimed 'external stylesheet report'. I was in, or so I thought.

1. I set up my .net app to send the theme name through a querystring, with which I'd be able to pick up the stylesheet (thinking I'd just drop it in the theme-specific folder and grab the path through application logic in the flex program). I did it and it spectacularly failed. Frustrated, I tried several configurations, but nothing worked. So, I made my way over to the Actionscript.org forums to see what I could dig up. As you can see here, I didn't make much progress. Apparently, I was going completely the wrong way (and may have thrown a little tantrum in the progress, but we'll look over that, heh.)

But just then, a fellow named Jeff with a blog post saved the day. After reading his instructions, I got correct results instantly! Fantastic. I now had my working project, which changed styles based on the asp.net theme I was in. I guess flex and asp.net just isn't quite right to be married to each other yet, no matter how much XML you pass back and forth.

Here's what I did:

__After init()__
public function CSSFormat():void{
  var theme:String = "default"
  var themeSWF:String = "default"

if(Application.application.parameters.Theme != undefined) { 
  theme= Application.application.parameters.Theme;
}

themeSWF = theme;

//conditional comments to take out hyphens were here, but I took them out to shorten it a bit. some directories use hyphens, while the swf files themselves have issues compiling like that.

var css_url:String = "App_Themes/" + theme + "/" + themeSWF + ".swf";StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations(css_url);}</pre>

Moral of the story? Although I got it to work, I'm sticking to Silverlight.