Today I ran into a situation where I wanted to display my password characters as a bullet versus the default asterisk (“*”).

I thought this would be pretty simple to do but realized after digging through the Flex 4 SDK that there was no public property I could set to change this. I tried hacking commitProperties and a couple of other methods but came up short in those areas as well until I found the exact spot in the Flex libraries where this character was defined:

RichEditableText.as (line 679)

1
2
3
4

    /**
     *  @private
     */
    mx_internal var passwordChar:String = "*";

A-ha! I see here that it’s prefixed with the “mx_internal” namespace and I remembered from other examples around the web that you can easily tap into that namespace and modify properties not normally meant to be modified.

Luckily, I had already extended the TextInput class for various other reasons and decided to add an event listener for the CREATION_COMPLETE lifecycle event of the component. This was added in the constructor:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

import mx.core.mx_internal;
 
/**
 * Constructor
 */
public function myTextInput()
{
	super();
 
	this.addEventListener( FlexEvent.CREATION_COMPLETE, onCreationComplete );
}
 
private function onCreationComplete( event : FlexEvent ) : void
{
	//change internal passwordChar to a bullet versus an asterisk
	this.textDisplay.mx_internal::passwordChar = "●";
}

…and voila! By tapping into the mx_internal namespace, I found I could modify the normally private variable “passwordChar” and set it to something I preferred better (in this case, the bullet point used in some sites like Twitter).

Hope this helps someone!