Situation: I was working with the Spark (Flex4) TextArea component. I wanted the background to no longer be visible or just simply alpha set to zero. I expected I could set a stylesheet property backgroundAlpha to zero. However, that didn’t work and there wasn’t even a property on the component called that. I dug in the source to find it and realized it is really contentBackgroundAlpha. Why? I see borderAlpha and expect to follow the same convention! I do not see contentBorderAlpha.

Why break a convention?
Why use contentBackgroundAlpha when borderAlpha is present and there is not already a backgroundAlpha?!

My opinion is that the following is a big bug.

When serializing/cloning an object that has required constructor parameters, you receive an error telling you the arguments are incorrect. Note: the following is just an example using a “native” flash class. Really, you should never have to serialize or clone an Event, so please just see it as an example class as the type of class isn’t the point.

import flash.net.registerClassAlias;
import flash.events.Event;
import mx.utils.ObjectUtil;

flash.net.registerClassAlias("flash.events.Event",Event);
var event:Event = new Event(Event.CHANGE);
var eventClone:* = ObjectUtil.copy(event);
trace(eventClone is Event)

RESULT
ArgumentError: Error #1063: Argument count mismatch on flash.events::Event(). Expected 1, got 0.
at flash.utils::ByteArray/readObject()
at mx.utils::ObjectUtil$/copy()
at Untitled_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()



As noted by Nutrox, “All constructor parameters need a default value. You can’t pass values directly to an object’s constructor when it is restored from serialised data because Flash creates an instance of the object automatically before calling the object’s readExternal() method.”

What are your thoughts? I’m interested in striking a conversation about this.