Removing a blinking cursor in Flex Flash Player

Question

I have a MX TextInput field on my form. As one of our user has seizure problems with blinking cursors, I am trying to disable it but without success. Through Control Panel, I have been able to prevent a blinking cursor in Office Apps and on the Web browsers but not with the Flex Application which uses the Flash Player. Has anyone come across this issue and have a solution?

You should specify if you are using a Spark TextInput or MX TextInput. — Sunil D.

Sunil D. Sunil D. · Accepted Answer · 2013-07-01T18:26:40

Here's a simple solution that removes the cursor all together. I'm not sure if you want to remove the cursor (feasible) or stop the cursor from blinking (seems less feasible).

It works by setting the underlying TextField object's selectable property to false. The MX TextInput class has it's own selectable property, however, the code in TextInput also requires the editable property to be false to disable selection. So you need to extend TextInput to work around that.

The underlying TextField doesn't expose any properties to stop the cursor from blinking (that I'm aware of). TextField is one of Flash Player's built in classes, so the chances of modifying this low level behavior seem slim.

This obviously breaks the ability to copy/paste in the TextInput. You might have to devise a way to temporarily enable selection to support copy/paste or selecting text in general.

package
{
    import mx.controls.TextInput;

    public class CustomTextInput extends TextInput
    {
        public function CustomTextInput()
        {
        }

        private var _hideCursor:Boolean = true;
        private var hideCursorChanged:Boolean = true;

        public function get hideCursor():Boolean
        {
            return _hideCursor;
        }

        public function set hideCursor(value:Boolean):void
        {
            if (value == hideCursor)
            {
                return;
            }
            hideCursorChanged = true;
            _hideCursor = value;
            invalidateProperties();
        }

        override protected function commitProperties():void
        {
            super.commitProperties();
            if (hideCursorChanged)
            {
                hideCursorChanged = false;
                textField.selectable = !_hideCursor;
            }
        }
    }
}

Removing a blinking cursor in Flex Flash Player

1 Answers