I’ll have to continue searching for a way to delay the disappearance of the tooltip when the user moves the mouse off the control. My use case has a clickable link in the tooltip. However, if the user moves the mouse off the control the tooltip goes away before the user can click it.

That sounds like the correct behavior (if I understand correctly). From ye olde docs:

The amount of time, in milliseconds, that Flex waits to hide the ToolTip after it appears. Once Flex hides a ToolTip, the user must move the mouse off the component and then back onto it to see the ToolTip again. If you set hideDelay to Infinity, Flex does not hide the ToolTip until the user triggers an event, such as moving the mouse off of the component.

The default value is 10000.

via http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionscript/3/mx/managers/ToolTipManager.html#hideDelay

Peter

i have a question too:
How can you dispatch the show tooltip event if im using a custom tooltip?
eg im using these 2 events to contol my tooltip:

this.addEventListener(ToolTipEvent.TOOL_TIP_CREATE,createCustomTip)
this.addEventListener(ToolTipEvent.TOOL_TIP_SHOW,positionTip)

they get fired automatically if i hover the mouse over my sprite, but i want to
show the tooltip in other cases too (like if the sprite coordinates have a specified value)

It may differ depending on the component, but try setting the toolTip property to an empty string.

Peter

Yeah, you can use the ToolTipManager class. I think I may even have an example of that somewhere already. Check out the “Creating tool tips manually using the ToolTipManager class” entry and let me know if that was what you were looking for.

Peter

Update: Here’s a slightly simpler example. To remove the tooltip (note that you can have multiple tool tips visible at the same time using the ToolTipManager class), simply call the ToolTipManager.destroyToolTip() method and pass in the tool tip instance to delete.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
        layout="vertical">

    <mx:Script>
        <![CDATA[
            import mx.controls.ToolTip;
            import mx.managers.ToolTipManager;

            private var tt:ToolTip;

            private function create_toolTip():void {
                var str:String = "Tooltip text goes here...";
                // We only want one tooltip.
                if (tt == null) {
                    tt = ToolTipManager.createToolTip(str, 100, 50) as ToolTip;
                }
            }
        ]]>
    </mx:Script>

    <mx:ApplicationControlBar dock="true">
        <mx:Button label="create tool tip" click="create_toolTip();" />
    </mx:ApplicationControlBar>

</mx:Application>