Entries Tagged 'Flex' ↓

Welcome SeaFlex’ers and other MXNA visitors. I haven’t gotten around to finishing up my article, but I’ve posted it on my BlazeDS + Flex page 

It’s really a draft right now, you’ll see strikeouts and everything.  Most of the content is in there, but I need to add a page or two about debugging the project, as getting an Ant-built project to debug properly in Flex can be a pain.  I’ll also be adding some info about how to debug your java code at the same time you are debugging your flex code.

Take a look, and feel free to leave comments.

I’ve recently committed to speaking at the Seattle Flex User Group meeting in Feb, and in preparation, I will be posting my ‘notes’ here. Hopefully I will be able to take you from knowing no java to being able to have a simple yet useful application working in BlazeDS. This application will utilize Java, Hibernate and MySQL to power the Resource Manager graph from ILOG Elixir. For Java newbies like myself, I can recommend the following reading materials (I recommend signing up for OReilly Safari):

• Getting Started with Hibernate 3 (OReilly Shortcut)
• Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse
• Head First Java

**update** I’ve moved everything to a static page, view it here: BlazeDS + Flex
Continue reading →

I have recently started branching my code out for multiple customers, and I needed an easy way for the Project Managers to be able to see more info about the deliverables, and be able to send that data back to me for bugfixes, feature requests, etc…

I’ve been using Ant for a while, it’s great for packaging up my Flash/AS2 applications, without including the .as, .fla, swd, etc.. files. And since so many java devs use SVN, I knew there had to be some sort of integration between the two. I eventually stumbled upon SVNANT, but was unable to get the 1.0.0 working on my machine. I found many references to 1.1.0, however, so I downloaded the source and compiled it (Thanks to Jeff at Alagad). This worked right away for me, so with the help of this post from Howard Scholtz, I was able to add in revsion #/time directly into the app without using svn keywords!

Code included after the break. Continue reading →

So, I’ve got some components that will need to be updated by non-programmers, so in the interest of keeping things easy to understand for them, I’m using Repeaters when I need to create multiple items based on Data (rather than creating my own component that creates these items itself through the data, which would be much more efficient, and less vexing).

So, using Repeaters creates many issues you don’t usually come in contact with. Here are some of the things I’ve run into, and the workarounds.

• Repeater.currentItem not available in the click handler
  • Same as with a list and an ItemRenderer, but because I just need a button, and nothing fancy, this is annoying. I got around this by setting the “data” property (FB won’t suggest data as a property, but it’s there!) to Repeater.currentItem.
• Repeater isn’t on the display list, and doesn’t have an array of ‘children’, so it’s hard to get at the items that were created.
  • A mysterious feature of Repeaters is that if you set the id of the items created, AS3 will see an array based on that ID
    This means that if I use <Button id=”buttonArray” /> I will be able to do a “for each(b:Button in buttonArray)” loop to get access to those buttons. This works just like the groupName property of RadioButtons.
• Button property ’selectedField’ only gets the state, and does not set the data’s value when ’selected’ is changed.
  • I’m not sure how I feel about this. Part of me expects that when the button changes to ’selected’, the data’s field should be changed too. Then the pedantic, MVC Loving part of me kicks in and wants to strangle anyone who lets the interface directly change the model… so I end up half-strangled and completely exhausted.

So, I’m sure it’s necessary, as bindings can happen at strange times, but null exceptions fail silently and can cause lots of debugging headaches when dealing with Data Bindings.

For me, I had forgotten to set an initialize value, so I was attempting to reach object.value, but object was null. Normally this throws an error, a quick and easy fix, but when this happens during Data Binding, no error, so you’re left scratching your head wondering why the hell your function is finishing on the 2nd line of code.

4 hours later, you look up and see that you forgot to initialize the var.

I just ran across an awesome tip/trick to remember when you need to cancel events in Flex. (or even writing your own).

From Sasha Magee @ Adobe on the ApolloCoders group:

The events that end in “ing” are the cancellable events that happen BEFORE the displayState change. We added these specifically so you could cancel the event.

I know, one of those things that seems obvious after you read it, but I hadn’t seen it said before. Something to keep in mind when your preventDefault() isn’t working.