[Component] CForm v1.0

CForm is all about creating data entry screens. This component allows developers to create standardized forms/CRUD screens in their applications. The CForm component is a Data Entry component that can be very useful if –

1. you are building business applications with many data entry/view screens
2. you are working with a lot of developers. each handling separate screens/modules
3. you wish all your screens to have the standard look & feel across the application
4. you wish to avoid different developers/designers designing their own UI/UX paradigms for their specific screens

Let me try to explain this in a very simplified manner. CForm reads XML file to create user entry forms. To implement CForm, the following steps are involved.

• Developer creates XML file for each screen. The XML will contain the list of fields, controls to be used etc.
• CForm is called in an MXML.
• Now, the developer can use many of CForm’s exposed methods to access/manipulate data in the CForm.

The Demo walks you through a few use cases of how CForm can be used in real world. There are clear instructions on each example in the demo. For a detailed documentation on the XML part of this component, check out here and for the AS and MXML angle check out below. The source code will also be made available shortly in a 2 or 3 weeks. As of now, if you need the source code you will have to check it out from the SVN repository at http://flexedtoolkit.googlecode.com/. If you like this component and would be willing to extend a helping hand, send me a mail 😉 .

If you have any questions/suggestions after viewing the demo, leave a comment on this page!!

**Update: Compiled SWC now available for download.

[ SWC | Demo | XML Documentation | Source of Example ]

Buzzword

I guess this is already old news by now. But, I just recently happened to check it out. I came to know about such an application when my Manager suggested it. After trying it out, I have one word – AWESOME!!!!

Ok. What I am talking about here is a full fledged online document application (Yeah! Just like Writely, Google Docs) developed in FLEX!!!! I was amazed at not only how feature rich the app was. I was stumbled totally because many of the stuff they have achieved. They have done stuff which I never thought was possible using Flex.

For me, Buzzword definitely takes Flex to the next level. It has been developed by the folks at Virtual Ubiquity. It says on their site –

Buzzword, the first real word processor for the web, is a breakthrough in collaborative authoring for documents that matter. Many online pundits agree with us.

And Guess what? Adobe is acquiring them. You can register and try it out yourself here. Check out the screenshots here. Click on thm to see a larger view.

CustomGrid v1.2

I am releasing the v1.2 of CGrid. It’s been in drafts for a long while now.This time, a few more basic niceties have been added to the CGrid. 🙂

1. Export to Excel (Copy selected rows or entire grid to clipboard and paste in excel)
2. User can select columns to view and width of the columns etc. This setting for each grid in the application is remembered across sessions.(For this to work properly, you will have to ensure that you always specify a distinct ID for for each grid in your application.) This feature is very useful, if you are fetching a lot of columns to display but are not sure whether all the users would be interested in all the columns. Now, the user can choose to see columns of his/her choice and that choice is remembered across sessions.
3. Fixed the sorting logic in the column sort.
4. The CGrid can now take in custom itemRenderer from the caller.

Check it out… 🙂 For more details about what CGrid is all about, check out this post.

It’s been a long time since I updated the grid component. Hey, for that matter… It’s been a log while since I last posted here. 🙂 Been quiet a bit busy lately. Anyway, am almost back. This month is also going to be a bit hectic. But, I hope to post regularly from September onwards.

Note: Thanks to all who downloaded CGrid v1.0 and used them in their projects. It really feels nice to see that the component has served some good purpose. The CGrid component is individually responsible for keeping my blog alive and  bringing in readers even though I haven’t posted anything new for the last couple of months. So, this component is kind of the ‘old man’ of this blog. Anyway, Lemme thank all visitors for checking it out. Keep downloading. Keep leaving comments 🙂 ….

[ Demo | Source | Sample Printout ]

Autorefresher Component

If you have been working on applications which serve highly dynamic data on the screen, you are most likely to have had to rely on the “polling” mechanism to get updated data from the back-end. We had similar requirement in our project and we created a tiny component using Flex’s Timer Class to fire a specific method at set frequencies.

And as usual, we didn’t to go around writing code all across the application to do this. The component we created can take in a function as an attribute. This function could be anything. It could be one that fires an SQL query and updates an ArrayCollection, or it could be one that sends out a Feed request or whatever! 🙂 It’s pretty easy to use the AutoRefresher. All you have to do is add the AutoRefresher to your view –

<flexed:AutoRefresher id="exampleAutoRefresh" delay="5000" refreshFunction="FunctionToBeFiredPeriodically" />

The view then, refreshes every x milliseconds specified for delay. The default is 15000 milliseconds or 15 seconds. In the init method of your view, before starting the autorefresher, set the owner of the refresher to the parent like this-

exampleAutoRefresh.owner = this;
exampleAutoRefresh.start();


Setting the owner is to make sure that our refresher stops and starts based on the views visibility. In most cases, Polling mechanism ends up being really costly on the back-end. Especially if you are dealing with multi-tiered architecture and trying to talk to a web server, database server etc over the network. And its very much possible, that multiple views in your application might be required to autorefresh periodically. If you are polling in all the screens whether they are required or not, you are most likely to end up crashing the back-end infrastructure. In order to address this problem and minimize the load on the back-end, we built in a mechanism into the refresher by which it stops if the view is visible and starts automatically when the view is visible. This is why we are setting the owner in the init method. So, if you have autorefresher running on view A and B; and the user is viewing view B, then only view B is refreshing and when the user moves to view A; view B stops refreshing and view A starts.

Special thanks to Easwar for making this idea work! This component might come in handy for many 🙂 . It sure saved a lot of effort for us 😉 . Check it out.

Note: The demo is very basic. All it does is gets the time every 3 seconds and updates the label in the view.

[ Demo | Source | ASDocs ]

Flex Explorers

I have been collecting all the “flex explorers” from time to time as they are rolled out. The Flex explorers have been really really handy when it comes to checking for some stuff which you are not sure whether is possible. Without the style explorer, we would have been completely lost! From a styling perspective, the api documentation seems a little complex for a designer to get an idea of how go about styling a component on screen.

On many occasions when I have an idea, instead of reading through the api docs, I just checkout the explorers to see if it is possible in flex. As for stuff like effects, filters etc., I have found it impossible to figure it out from the api docs.

Over the past months, we have seen many explorers being released by adobe and other developers around the world. I have consolidated them under the FLEX EXPLORERS heading on the right side (below the Flex Components section). Check it out. If I have missed out anything, do drop a comment 🙂 .

Client/User Idle Timeout Component

I was looking around in the net for an effective client/user IDLE TIMEOUT mechanism. My requirement was very simple – The UI should time-out if the user is idle for more than 5 minutes. In geek terminology, IDLE translates to zero keystrokes and zero mouse movements.

After googling around and then spending some time at Flexcoders, I came across a link from the CFML site – an example for just what I wanted to do 🙂 . So, we went and took that script and added a few bells and whistles to it before converting it into a re-usable component. And here’s what we have :-

The ClientIdleTimeOut component can be added to an application using-
<flexed:ClientIdleTimeOut id="TimerId" onTimeOut="FunctionPassedFromCaller" listenKeyStroke="true|false" listenMouseMove="true|false" timeOutInterval="1" confirmInterval="1" />
Now, when the application starts, the timer starts. If there is no user activity for the timeOutInterval specified, then a timeout warning pops up and stays up for confirmInterval time. Once the confirmInterval has been crossed, the application is timedout. At this point, three actions happen – 1. The application is disabled; 2. The FunctionPassedFromCaller set to the onTimeOut attribute is fired; 3. An event of type appTimedOut is dispatched. We can have a listener for this event and fire our actions at this point apart from the onTimeOut function.

So, thats what the ClientIdleTimeOut does 🙂 . Check it out. Enjoy

PS: The Demo has an idle timeout for 3 mins. and a warning prompt of 2 mins. The ASDocs provided is more of an experiment 😉 .

[ Demo | Source | ASDocs ]

[Asual] SWFAddress v1.1

The stuff looks neat. But, am still not sure whether we need it as now we have History Management built in as part of the Flex project compilation. Checkout the demo.

SWFAddress is a small script that sits on top of SWFObject and provides deep linking for Flash websites and applications. In other words it enables the Back, Forward and Reload buttons of the browser and creates unique URLs with page titles that can be sent over email or IM. SWFAddress uses the ExternalInterface functionality introduced in Flash Player 8 and comes with a technique that enables search engine indexing for deep Flash links.

[ Read more… | Flex Demo ]

[On Reflexion]Cool Flex Theme

How easy is it to skin a Flex application? As an experiment, Eylon Stroh[On Reflexion] tried to create something that looks like the Napkin L&F for a simple Flex app.

The application is a slightly modified version of the DataGrid sample from the Flex 2 Component Explorer. Here are the “before” and “after” screenshots (click on the screenshot to see the app):

Before:

After:

So, was it easy? He has break it down into three separate stages. The first stage involves adding CSS styles and graphical skins to the app; the second stage involves using programmatic skins; the third stage deals with subclassing Flex framework classes in order to achieve fine-grained control of the look-and-feel.

Great Work!!!

[Read More | Demo]

Vertical MenuBar Component

[dougmccune.com] Doug had posted a really good component in his blog – A Vertical MenuBar. This is really good as we now have one more navigation model other than the Accordion that can be docked on the left or right side of the application. check it out 🙂 . He also has a slick demo over there.

Someone on the Adobe Flex forum asked a question about being able to have vertical menus using a MenuBar component. The response from Peter Ent from Adobe was that no, Flex does not include a MenuBar component that can handle vertical menus, but feel free to make one yourself and post it <hint, hint>.

After I read that it felt like a challenge, so here’s the solution: a Vertical MenuBar component. It extends MenuBar and works the same way, except the Menu items are stacked vertically and the menus open up either to the left or to the right of the menu bar. I’ve included the full source, it uses two classes, one that’s an extension of mx.controls.MenuBar, and another one that’s an extension of mx.controls.menuClasses.MenuItemRenderer. You can specify whether you want the menu to open to the left or the right by using the new direction property of the new component.

[ Read the original post | Source ]

[Coding Cowboys]Validating forms in Flex 2

There are many different ways to validate forms in Flex. Which can make it hard to know what is the best method to use. Thru trial and error, this is the best and simplest solution for validating forms in most all situations.

[ Read More |  Demo ]