Best way to do loaders in a flex application?

What is the best way to do a loader in a flex application? I have an animated .gif that is to be used as our loader (whenever I need to wait for an action to complete), and I am not sure the best way to do it.

This is how I am thinking开发者_运维百科:

Have the loader be a custom component. On the parent application, add an event listener for my custom event AceEvent.SHOW_LOADER. In the event listener, use the PopUpManager to show the loader. Listen for AceEvent.HIDE_LOADER. Get rid fo the loader via PopUpManager.

What do you think about this? Is there a better way to do it?

Thanks!

Andrew

Well, last I checked, animated gifs don't work in Flex unless you have a workaround. Still, I wouldn't use an animated gif to create an animation because of their low quality. I would just recreate it using Flash.

The way I would do the loader however would be very different. personally, I don't believe in 'system loaders' unless it's your application's preloader. The reason for this is that there could be more than one thing loading at the same time (which might not know about each other) which means that the loader popup could disappear before everything is loaded (first one loads, dispatches event and removes popup, while the other is still loading).

What I like to do is create a custom component for the popup loader (since it will be reused quite a bit) and from there I can either use states the are appropriate for my view or have a boolean flag binded to show the popup when true (this can easily be done using frameworks like Parsley). The popup would only cover the part of the system that's actually loading data (since I doubt that your whole app is loading data at the same time) which makes for a better UX.

I ended up using as3gif (until I can get this recreated as a .swf). The way I do this is by using my custom event class (AceEvent.SHOW_LOADER and AceEvent.HIDE_LOADER), which bubbles up to the top. I then use the PopUpManager to add/remove this with modal to disable the application.