Flex Monkey Patches

OK…so I guess I kind of passed over these yesterday in my announcements. To me, the fact that there would be new releases timed with MAX was known and to anyone in the community there was probably a strong suspicion that there would at least be a new point release at MAX 2008. But in an effort to correct my oversight, here are links to the announcements by the product managers:

Matt Chotin (PM for Flex SDK) announces Flex Builder 3.0.2 and Flex SDK 3.2 (with support for AIR 1.5 and Flash Player 10).

Anil Channappa (PM for LCDS and BlazeDS) announces LCDS 2.6.1 and BlazeDS 3.2.

I while back, I produced an Adobe Captivate screen-cast for one of my customers showing some tricks and tips (say that 3 times fast) on using the Flex Builder 3 profiler. I kept meaning to post it to my blog and finally after getting a kick in the pants from Alex Harui and Jun Heider posting good blog entries on the same topic, here is my post.

Here is Alex’s blog post:
http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/2008/09/using_the_flex_builder_3x_prof.html

Here is Jun’s presentation:
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/09/360flex-sj-2008-using-flex-builder-3.php

I think my content actually sits comfortably in between these two and as a trio they cover a lot of useful ground in making users more proficient with the Flex Builder profiler.

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Flex 3 has been out since Monday of this week and there are a lot of new learning resources available through the adobe website.

This is my favorite starting point:
http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Getting+Started

Within that page is a “download projects” link that has some great Flex Builder example projects for various things:

http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Download+Projects

* Building a simple RIA
* Exchanging data with a server
o PHP version
o JSP version
o ColdFusion version
o ASP.NET version
* Working with data
o PHP
o JSP
o ColdFusion
o ASP.NET
* Handling events
* UI layout
* Displaying lists
* Customizing components
* Multi-page apps
* Debugging

Also, slightly buried within the Getting Started guide is a list of compatibility issues:

http://learn.adobe.com/wiki/display/Flex/Backwards+Compatibility+Issues

So it is almost February already! Where did January go? I’ve been a bit slow out of the gate this year as far as keeping up a decent pace in posting helpful samples to my blog. Actually, I have been working on things behind the scenes, a few details of which I will reveal now. I have launched a new blog on a new domain. The content is to be all “work” related, so it will be about Flex/Flash Player/Adobe AIR, LiveCycle Data Services/Blaze DS/ColdFusion and other fun technologies. I’ve also been working on an AIR app which I hope to get out at least in a fairly stable beta form around the same time that Flex3/AIR releases. It will most likely be open source and hosted on Google Code. I will also be compiling a library of useful components, extensions to components and monkey patches to the Flex framework. This new blog and content will all be available on:

http://flexmonkeypatches.com

All old posts on http:blog.739SaintLouis.com should link to or redirect to the same content on my new site. I will leave my old site up for an undetermined length of time with the intent of transforming it content-wise into a more personal blog (time permitting.)

Regards,

-Kyle

I just recently was made aware that there are actually 3 different “builds” of Flex SDK “hotfix 3″ out there.
1. Originally hotfix 3 was applied to hotfix 2 (updating a few swcs) – version 1
2. Late summer 2007 it was realized this confused some folks so the hotfix kb article was replaced with a full version of the SDK with the fixes applied – version 2
3. Flex Builder 3 beta 2 shipped with the latest/greatest SDK from the 2.0.1 branch which is an equivalent to hotfix 3 SDK – version 3.

These versions should be functionally identical afaik.

I updated my version checker to detect and differentiate these versions. I have updated the original blog entry here and also have links to the update AIR app here.

This post is to carry on from my previous post regarding moving data from ColdFusion CFCs to Flex 2 Applications Using Webservices.

Here is the first sample showing basic retrieval of a string via Remote Object:

Browse the source of this example.
Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

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One of my first blog posts pointed to a dev center article that I wrote on this topic for the Flex 2 release. I often send customers to look at this article when appropriate as it is a good starting point for webservice and remoteobject communication between Flex and Coldfusion. I also find myself referring to this sample once in a while and so I have finally decided to host the sample and cfc from my website/blog and potentially enhance the cfc to support more use cases for subsequent blog posts.

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx :Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" >
    </mx><mx :Script>
        < ![CDATA[
            import mx.rpc.events.ResultEvent;
            import mx.controls.Alert;
           
            [Bindable]
            public var sResult:String;
               
            public function handleStringResult(event:ResultEvent):void{
                sResult=event.result as String; 
            }
           
        ]]>
    </mx>
       
    <mx :WebService id="myService"
        useProxy="false"
        wsdl="http://739saintlouis.com/services/HelloWorld.cfc?wsdl"
        showBusyCursor="true">     
        <mx peration name="sayHelloString" result="handleStringResult(event)" fault="Alert.show(event.fault.message)"/>
    </mx>
    <mx :Label id="lblStringResult" text="{sResult}"/> 
    <mx :Button label="get String via Webservice" click="myService.sayHelloString.send()"/>

 

Browse the source of this example.
Download a zipfile containing the source to this sample.

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Here is an example demonstrating how to use project references to refer to source files in other projects as well as swcs in other projects.

If you take a look at this zip file, you will find that it contains 3 projects.

The first project is a normal Flex project called globalIncludes which contains an actionscript file, vars.as.
A second project, Expando, is a library project, which contains an mxml component.

• In the properties/Project References dialogue for this project there is a checked refererence to the globalIncludes project.
• In the properties/sourcepath for this project, I have added the root folder from the globalIncludes project. (Just click the add Folder… button and navigate to the folder.) This folder is added as ${DOCUMENTS}\globalIncludes.

Now in your Expando project you can see a “virtual directory” from the globalIncludes project labeled – [source path] globalIncludes.

In my mxml component in the Expando project, I refer to the actionscript file from the globalIncludes project by doing an include:

Then in my component I use a variable defined in that vars,as actionscript file to expose a version number tooltip in my component.

Note:

In the Expando project, I have right clicked on the ExpandoComboBox.mxml and selected – “Include class in library”. That way, whenever I make changes to this component, the swc will be recompiled.

My third project, Sample, is a normal project that just has an application in it.

• In the properties/Project References dialogue for this project there is a checked refererence to the Expando project.
• In the properties/Flex Build Path/Library Path dialogue for this project, I have added the Expando Project (click Add Project… and you will be able to select the Expando project since it is in the list of Project references.)

Now you can launch the Sample.mxml application and see that the tooltip for the ExpandoComboBox is 1.0 which has come from the vars.as actionscript file in the globalIncludes project.

This is installment 3 in the series.
The previous 2 related posts are:

Changing embedded True Type fonts at Runtime in Flex Applications

Using Modules to Change embedded True Type fonts at Runtime in Flex Applications

This approach is a little different.
The application is very similar, but instead of using a loader or module loading, I use the StyleManager to load a runtime CSS swf (which was compiled from a CSS file).

Here is one of the style sheets that is tuned into a CSS swf:

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This is really part 2 in the series. Part 1 was Changing embedded True Type fonts at Runtime in Flex Applications

The interface that I have each font swf implementing is the same, so I have not posted the code.

The application has undergone some slight refactoring and I have added a few things.
I chose to use the ModuleManager.getModule(url) rather than using the mx:ModuleLoader tag.
The module Manager was more flexible and really should be used for loading non-visual modules.

Note the way that you get access to the loaded module after it has loaded:

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