Today someone asked on flexcoders if you can make the Panel component dock the ControlBar component to the top of the Panel instead of the bottom of the Panel. The short answer is no, you can’t. The longer answer is you can extend Panel and make a few minor adjustments and then yes, you can.

Here’s an extension of the Panel class that allows you to specify a new property: controlBarPosition, which can either be “top” or “bottom”.

The one caveat about this class is that if you set the control bar to be placed at the top, you should set the roundedBottomCorners style of the Panel to false. Otherwise the bottom corners of the control bar will be drawn rounded as well, which looks kind of weird if they’re not at the bottom of the panel (if you’re curious why take a look at the source of mx.skins.halo.HaloBorder, around line 470).

View the source.