So I am always on the lookout for new material to read in this world we call Web Development. More specifically I look for ColdFusion material and Flex material. I bit the bullet and bought Fusion Authority and Flex Authority and here is my short review.
Cesare Rocchi over at Spreading Funkyness has an excellent post on Garbage Collection with Adobe Flex and Adobe Air. This is more of a reference for myself but I recommend it to everyone.
http://spreadingfunkyness.com/garbage-collection-with-flex-and-adobe-air/
Dealing with dates in Flex 3 is a little bit confusing and annoying to me. The latest confusion is the time zone offest functionality. If you do nothing but pass a date value from a database straight to Flex 3, that date will automatically be adjusted according to the users Time Zone.
If you havnt tried this out it is a must. Add this little plugin to your Flex Builder to instantly clean up your code. The plugin indents your code and adds commenting. You can customize some things in the preferences.
For more details on the plugin go here:
http://flexformatter.sourceforge.net/
Simple Find and Intall this site to Flex Builder:
http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite
Once it is fully installed you will notice 5 new buttons. They are very self explanatory. Give it a try and thank Seth Duffey over at http://www.leavethatthingalone.com/ for pointing it out to me.
I love the little things that make life easier. Thanks SETH!
There is a little bug in the AdvancedDataGridColumn formatter. For whatever reason when you try to call the DataFormatter directly the year gets spit out incorrectly. The work around is to use a label function that calls the exact same formatter.
The below code shows the code that will throw an incorrect format and the correct format. I highlighted the 3 columns that are of importance. The start date calls the labelFunction which correctly formats the date. The end date uses the built in formatter which incorrectly displays the year and the hours worked uses the formatter to correctly format a number. I included the hours worked just to show that it is only a date problem.
Hope this helps someone from banging head on the wall!
Here is a quick example of how to sort an ArrayCollection using a TextInput. This could be used in many different ways but I chose to use a datagrid example. I would like to know another technique if someone has a good one to share.
If you have ever tried to return struct to Flex 3 from ColdFusion you may have run into this problem. If you use dot (.) notation to define your struct variable, the variable will get passed in UPPER CASE. This causes problems because Flex 3 and actionscript are case sensitive. Not knowing this little fact may cause you to bang your head on some walls.
I was going through AdobeTV and can across a cool video I thought was worth sharing. It is on Flex 3 and ColdFusion Using VO's and CFC's. I recommend checking it out if you have an extra hour (53 min).
Adobe and facebook have just come out with a new ActionScript Library API to connect flex and facebook. It looks pretty cool and I recommend poking around at the development center located here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook/
They have even supplied an easy step by step article to get started which can be found here:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/facebook/articles/build_your_first_facebook_app.html
I am going to have to play with this on my spare time that does not exist! :)
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