I'm pulling my hair on this because it should be simple, but can't get it to do the right thing. What's the best practice way of doing the following

I've created a custom component that extends <s:Label> so now the Label has additional properties color2 color3 value which can be called like this and are used in the skin.

<s:CustomLabel text="Some text"
               color2="0x939202"
               color3="0x999999"
               value="4.5" />

If I don't supply these parameters, I'd like some defaults to be set. So far I've had some success, but it doesn't work 100% of the time, which leads me to think that I'm not following best practices when setting those defaults.

I do it now like this:

[Bindable] private var myColor2:uint = 0x000000;
[Bindable] private var myColor3:uint = 0x000000;
[Bindable] private var myValue:Number = 10.0;

then in the init function, I do a variation of this to set the default

myValue = hostComponent.value;
myValue = (hostComponent.value) ? hostComponent.value : 4.5;

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, depending on the type of variable I'm trying to set. I eventually decided to read them as Strings then convert them to the desired type, but it seems that this also works half the time.