Penguinspeak » Flex

How to loop through properties of a custom object/VO

99miles — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:29:46 +0000

If you just have a plain ol boring object, you can loop through it with a basic for…in:

var myObj:Object = {x:1, y:5};
for (var i:String in myObj)
{
    trace(i + ": " + myObj[i]);
}

However, if you have a custom value object, that doesn’t quite work. But what you can do is use describeType() to create an XMLList version on your VO.


var vo : SearchVO = data.getBody() as SearchVO;
// create an XMLList version of the VO
var varList:XMLList = describeType(vo)..variable;

// loop through the property list
for(var i:int; i < varList.length(); i++){
    // output the property name and value
    trace(varList[i].@name+':'+ vo[varList[i].@name]);
}

Why is only one of my List (or Datagrid, Tree, etc.) rows selectable?

99miles — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:57:29 +0000

I remember hitting this before — after binding some data to a DataGrid (or any ListBase subclass) no matter where I rolled over the DataGrid only the last row was being highlighted.
After remembering that these ListBase classes rely on a unique id (uid) for each row/object, I started digging around and found that in my case, I was binding to VO’s which I had given a ‘uid’ property. This was interfering simply because I hadn’t yet hooked up that uid property so it wasn’t yet containing a unique id. So every row had the same unique id causing the DataGrid to essentially think it had only one row.
There are definitely other scenarios when something similar would happen. There’s more info here.

Associative array of U.S. state codes

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:07:50 +0000

Just in case it’ll save anyone some time some day…


			var _stateCodes : Array = new Array();
			_stateCodes["AL"] = "Alabama";
			_stateCodes["AK"] = "Alaska";
			_stateCodes["AS"] = "American Somoa";
			_stateCodes["AZ"] = "Arizona";
			_stateCodes["AR"] = "Arkansas";
			_stateCodes["CA"] = "California";
			_stateCodes["CO"] = "Colorado";
			_stateCodes["CT"] = "Connecticut";
			_stateCodes["DE"] = "Delaware";
			_stateCodes["DC"] = "District Of Columbia";
			_stateCodes["FM"] = "Federated States of Micronesia";
			_stateCodes["FL"] = "Florida";
			_stateCodes["GA"] = "Georgia";
			_stateCodes["GU"] = "Guam";
			_stateCodes["HI"] = "Hawaii";
			_stateCodes["ID"] = "Idaho";
			_stateCodes["IL"] = "Illinois";
			_stateCodes["IN"] = "Indiana";
			_stateCodes["IA"] = "Iowa";
			_stateCodes["KS"] = "Kansas";
			_stateCodes["KY"] = "Kentucky";
			_stateCodes["LA"] = "Lousiana";
			_stateCodes["ME"] = "Maine";
			_stateCodes["MH"] = "Marshall Islands";
			_stateCodes["MD"] = "Maryland";
			_stateCodes["MA"] = "Massachussetts";
			_stateCodes["MI"] = "Michigan";
			_stateCodes["MN"] = "Minnesota";
			_stateCodes["MS"] = "Mississippi";
			_stateCodes["MO"] = "Missouri";
			_stateCodes["MT"] = "Montana";
			_stateCodes["NE"] = "Nebraska";
			_stateCodes["NV"] = "Nevada";
			_stateCodes["NH"] = "New Hampshire";
			_stateCodes["NJ"] = "New Jersey";
			_stateCodes["NM"] = "New Mexico";
			_stateCodes["NY"] = "New York";
			_stateCodes["NC"] = "North Carolina";
			_stateCodes["ND"] = "North Dakota";
			_stateCodes["MP"] = "Northern Mariana Islands";
			_stateCodes["OH"] = "Ohia";
			_stateCodes["OK"] = "Oklahoma";
			_stateCodes["OR"] = "Oregon";
			_stateCodes["PW"] = "Palau";
			_stateCodes["PA"] = "Pennsylvania";
			_stateCodes["PR"] = "Puerto Rico";
			_stateCodes["RI"] = "Rhode Island";
			_stateCodes["SC"] = "South Carolina";
			_stateCodes["SD"] = "South Dakota";
			_stateCodes["TN"] = "Tennessee";
			_stateCodes["TX"] = "Texas";
			_stateCodes["UT"] = "Utah";
			_stateCodes["VT"] = "Vermont";
			_stateCodes["VI"] = "Virgin Islands";
			_stateCodes["VA"] = "Virginia";
			_stateCodes["WA"] = "Washington";
			_stateCodes["WV"] = "West Virginia";
			_stateCodes["WI"] = "Wisconsin";
			_stateCodes["WY"] = "Wyoming";

Embedding fonts in Flex 4

admin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:16:16 +0000

In Flex 3 I created a component where I needed to embed the fonts. I did so with:

[Embed(source='assets/fonts/ARIALBD.TTF', fontName='tabfont', fontWeight='bold')]

Until Flex 4 halo components use Flash Player 10 FTE based text (remembering that FTE is only compatible with CFF embedded fonts), you’ll have to also specify embedAsCFF=’false’ because the legacy Flash Player TextField based text cannot use CFF embedded fonts.

Additionally Spark skins for halo components now use the plain font instead of bold.

So now, to do the same in Flex 4, it’s:

[Embed(source='assets/fonts/ARIAL.TTF', embedAsCFF='false', fontName='tabfont')]

Ruby on Rails extension for Flex 4

admin — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:42:45 +0000

http://dcdror.riaforge.org/

Actionscript 3- Vector to Array

99miles — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:16:04 +0000

There’s currently no way to convert a Vector to an Array (or ArrayCollection), so here’s a simple util that’ll do it. Accepts any type within the Vector, so the parameter is just an Object, then we convert it back to a vector before the Array conversion. Phew.

public static function VectorToArray( v:Object ):Array
{
    var vec : Vector. = Vector.(v);
    var arr : Array = new Array()
    for each( var i : Object in vec ) {
        arr.push(i);
    }
    return arr;
}

Crossdomain.xml files in Rails projects

99miles — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:44:35 +0000

Usually when you need to allow a swf on one server access to data on another domain you would put a crossdomain.xml file in the root folder of that server.
I’ve found one exception which is if you are making a call to Rails the crossdomain.xml file to the ‘public’ folder of your Rails project.

Flex and ColdFusion: RemoteObjects and WebServices

99miles — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 16:33:57 +0000

Once you have a ColdFusion CFC you can call it’s methods with a RemoteObject or via a WebService.
RemoteObjects are usually preferred for their performance speed.

Here we’ll create a super basic example of calling a CFC from both a WebService and a RemoteObject. The application will simply let you enter your name, click a button, call the CFC and return a welcome message including your name.

To set up our examples, let create a most basic CFC. Let’s call this file NEWCFComponent.cfc and this’ll be it’s contents:

 <cfcomponent displayname="CF_Service" output="false"> <cffunction name="WelcomeMsg" access="remote" returntype="string"> <cfargument name="name" type="string" required="yes"> <cfreturn "YO, #name#!"> </cffunction> </cfcomponent> 

You can see this simply takes the #name# variable that it retrieves and returns the welcome message “Yo, #name#!”.

Okay, let’s first call this with a WebService. Just create a basic local Flex project.
Here’s the main application for that project:

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"> <mx:Script> <![CDATA[ import mx.rpc.events.FaultEvent; import mx.rpc.Fault; import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent; private function onResult( e : ResultEvent ) :void { msg.text = e.result.toString(); } private function onFault( e : FaultEvent ) :void { trace( 'Oops!' ); } ]]> </mx:Script> <mx:WebService id="ws" wsdl="http://<server-name-or-IP>:8500/cf/CF_Service/NewCFComponent.cfc?wsdl” showBusyCursor=”true”> <mx:operation name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"> <mx:request xmlns=""> <name> {_name.text} </name> </mx:request> </mx:operation> </mx:WebService> <mx:Button x="284" y="10" label="Get Welcome Message." click="ws.WelcomeMsg.send()"/> <mx:TextInput id="msg" x="681" y="10"/> <mx:TextInput id="_name" x="116" y="10"/> <mx:Label x="10" y="12" text="Enter your name:"/> </mx:Application> 

Modify the ‘wsdl’ attribute of the WebService tag as necessary to point to your CF server.

That’s it! Now Run the Flex app, enter your name, click the button and see your welcome message!

Now let’s do the same thing but use a RemoteObject.

Create a Flex Project and in the Flex Project Wizard choose ‘ColdFusion’ for the server type and ‘ColdFusion Flash Remoting’. Point the ‘Web root’ and ‘Root URL’ to your CF server.

Use the same contents for the Flex application as above except remove the WebService tag and all it’s contents, and put this in it’s place:

 <mx:RemoteObject id="ws" destination="ColdFusion" source="cf.CF_Service.NewCFComponent"> <mx:method name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"/> </mx:RemoteObject> 

The ‘destination’ is the remote destination as defined in remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory). ‘ColdFusion’ is a pre-defined, built-in destination.
The ‘source’ attribute should point to the location of your CFC starting at the server root. Note that this does not include the CFC extension, just the name of the CFC.

Go ahead and run the app and it should behave just the same as the WebService version we created above, but maybe faster.

If you want to create you own destination you can do that easily. Open remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory and add this destination:

 <destination id="cfRemotingExample"> <channels> <channel ref="my-cfamf"/> </channels> <properties> cf.CF_Service.NewCFComponent</source>  <access>  <use-mappings>false</use-mappings>  <method-access-level>remote</method-access-level> </access> <property-case>  <force-cfc-lowercase>false</force-cfc-lowercase>  <force-query-lowercase>false</force-query-lowercase>  <force-struct-lowercase>false</force-struct-lowercase> </property-case> </properties> </destination> 

The ‘source’ attribute should point to the location of your CFC starting at the server root. This should be identical to the ‘source’ attribute you had in your RemoteObject tag.

Now a couple quick modifications to the RemoteObject and we’re good to go:

 <mx:RemoteObject id="ws" destination="cfRemotingExample" showBusyCursor="true"> <mx:method name="WelcomeMsg" result="onResult(event)" fault="onFault(event)"/> </mx:RemoteObject> 

Notice we just changed the ‘destination’ attribute to point to our new destination name, and we removed the ‘source’ attribute because we included that in the of our custom destination in remoting.config.xml.
For now we’ll just use the default remote destination configured in remoting-config.xml (located in the /WEB-INF/flex directory)

Adobe Online Developer Week

99miles — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 14:42:00 +0000

Join us for the Adobe Online Developer Week which already under way!
http://adobe.com/go/2008_developer_week
There are a bunch of cool sessions about Flex, AIR, LCDS and more…

Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 released!

99miles — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 16:39:10 +0000

Check ‘em out!
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/
And here’s a good New York Times article about AIR: Adobe Blurs Lines Between PC and Web