Flex ComboBox, default value and dataproviders

Question

I have a Flex ComboBox that gets populated by a dataprovider all is well...

I would now like to add a default " -- select a item --" option at the 0 index, how can I do this and still use a dataprovider? I have not seen any examples of such, but I can't imagine this being hard...

Solution 1

If you don't need the default item to be selectable you can use the prompt property of ComboBox and set the selectedIndex to -1. That will show the string you set propmt to as the selected value until the user chooses another. It will not appear in the list of options, however.

Solution 2

The way I've dealt with this in the past is to create a new collection to serve as the data provider for the combobox, and then I listen for changes to the original source (using an mx.BindingUtils.ChangeWatcher). When I get such a notification, I recreate my custom data provider.

I wish I knew a better way to approach this; I'll monitor this question just in case.