Actionscript 3.0 simultaneous multiple textarea

Question

We are developing an AIR application for a huge touch table (110-inch, with 40 simultaneous touch points) that should allow multiple users to collaborate during a meeting by exchanging documents, contacts, notes etc. We are using: actionscript 3, robotlegs framework to wire the application stacks and for the dependency injection, gesture works for touch points and gestures management. Every user has the possibility of opening a bloc-notes to take on the fly notes. Every bloc-note has its own virtual keyboard, now the problem is that the keyboard is bind with the focus event of the text area so when there are more than one textarea all the keyboards on the stage write on the text area focused. We have used other kinds of events but we couldn't work out this problem. Any idea in how to manage focus events for multiple users or put in another way is it possible with actionscript to have multiple focus areas on a unique stage (even if this could appear contradictory)?

Answer 1

You could manage focus manually by having a single, high-priority 'key down' event listener on stage and then routing the keypresses appropriately, but then the problem becomes differentiating from which keyboard the key event originated. If you have custom keyboards, that could be fixed by having keyboards post custom key down events.

Hope this helps.