Andrew Alderson Flash, Flex and Beyond

I decided to take some time today an try out Flash Builder beta 2. There used to be a time when I was really excited about trying beta software but now with being so busy I tend to just pass. I was actually interested in trying the FlexUnit integration. All in all once I got it working it was really great and I am glad it has been added as a feature.

Problem: How do you implement invalidation in a non-visual class?

Solution: Use an instance of UIComponent to proxy the invalidation.

I recently ran into a problem with a drawing application I am working on. It wasn’t a major problem but I am sure someone else will run into it. The problem is with sending ByteArray's through WebORB as a parameter or a variable in a ValueObject.

After my first article on WebOrb and dates in PHP I ran into another problem when sending dates from Flex to a PHP class through WebORB. This time it was a date that was sent as a property of a Value Object and not a parameter of the method. I finally decided it was time to figure this out once and for all.

While poking around in the Flex SDK source code I came across an undocumented class called AsyncDispacther under \Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks\3.2.0\frameworks\projects\rpc\src\mx\rpc and it reminded me of some of the tricks we used to use before Flash Player 9 to overcome problems we encountered.

Scenario: You need to validate user input in a TextInput component for legal values.

Solution : Use the 'textInput' event to intercept the characters a users types before they are committed and cancel the committing of the character if it is illegal.

This is a problem that I have ran into in the past but never really investigated it. This problem has 2 parts - the first comes from sending a Date object from Flex through WebORB for PHP and then using that date in a sql query and the second comes from pulling a date from a MySQL table in PHP and returning it to Flex.