Flex Doc Team

I’m an Adobe writer assigned primarily to Flex Builder and the Flex SDK. I joined Adobe in October of 2007 and have spent the first few months learning and using Flex and Flex Builder.

I’ve recently completed my first Flex application, and am using this blog to write about my learning experience, and also to describe some of the concepts behind the application that make it work. Actually, these are two applications that work together, vRadio and RadioLoginDB.

These applications illustrate how to use Flex to create a master-detail application that accesses data from a PHP server, and also incorporates PHP sessions.

At the end of this posting is a list of documentation sources I used to learn how to create the applications. I also have links to the source files.

vRadio and RadioLoginDB applications

I have always been a fan of Community Radio, and in the past I’ve Googled “Community Radio” to find new stations to listen to over the web. I created the vRadio application to provide a Flex alternative that lists Community and Talk radio stations, providing details about each station including station name and location, station graphic, and clickable links to open the station. RadioLoginDB is a CRUD application to update the database of radio stations used by vRadio.

vRadio is a Master-Detail application, and corresponds to many type of applications that present stored data in a variety of presentation formats, and also provide forms for updating the data.

What is interesting about the the vRadio application is the way Flex handles XML data using the E4X format. By providing an XML feed into the vRadio application, the application displays the XML data in a tree view. When the user clicks a node in the tree, details are displayed.

Continue reading "Master-Detail Flex Application" »

Posted by Vince Genovese at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Someone recently asked if there were any ways to fade text out in a Flex app without having to embed the font for that text. Currently, if you want to appkly the Fade effect to any controls that contain text in a Flex app, you have to embed the font so that Flash Player can do the fading properly.

This question led to an interesting thread that revealed a couple of alternatives to fading text without embedding the font. The result is that the SWF file size is smaller because it doesn't contain any font symbols.

First, here's code that embeds a font and defines a fadeIn and fadeOut effect:

[Embed("assets/MyriadWebPro.ttf", fontName="MyMyriad")]

public var myriad_font:Class;

...

<mx:Fade id="fadeOut" duration="1000" alphaFrom="1.0" alphaTo="0.0"/>

<mx:Fade id="fadeIn" duration="1000" alphaFrom="0.0" alphaTo="1.0"/>


<mx:Label id="label1" text="Hello World"  

            fontFamily="MyMyriad" fontSize="24"

            hideEffect="{fadeOut}" showEffect="{fadeIn}"/>

Here's the running example:

This app is 190K. It works very well because the Fade effect is applied directly to the control that uses an embedded font to render the text.

If you didn't embed the font, then the Fade effect would appear to fail: instead of a slow fade, you'd get a single instant where the text disappears. Non-embedded fonts don't include bitmap information for the Player to apply a Fade effect to.

Here's a running example that shows the failing fade on non-embedded text:

Now for the alternatives.

The first alternative is really clever: Apply the BlurFilter to the text before attempting to fade it in and out. When you apply a BlurFilter to text, Flash Player converts the text to a bitmap. Once the text is a bitmap, it can be faded in and out with the Fade effect. So instead of actually blurring the text with the BlurFilter, you just apply the BlurFilter with some dummy settings (0,0,0), and then you can fade the text with the Fade effect.

Here's the code that applies a BlurFilter to the text when the app initializes:

  private function addBlurFilter():void {

  var bf:BlurFilter = new BlurFilter(0,0,0);

  var myFilters:Array = new Array();

  myFilters.push(bf);

  label3.filters = myFilters;

}

When you toggle the checkbox, the Fade effect now appears to work seamlessly. Here's the running example:

The SWF file size is 165K. Adding the BlurFilter does not increase the SWF file size because you don't have to embed the font symbols. It might increase runtime memory usage because Flash Player now has to keep bitmap data in memory for that text, but it's still a damn clever trick, I think.

The second alternative is to use the Dissolve effect rather than the Fade effect. The Dissolve effect actually creates a rectangle over the target area, and applies a dissolve to the rectangle so that the underlying content appears to fade in and out.

Dissolve effects are set up and applied just like Fade effects:

<mx:Dissolve id="dissolveOut" duration="1000" alphaFrom="1.0" alphaTo="0.0"/>

<mx:Dissolve id="dissolveIn" duration="1000" alphaFrom="0.0" alphaTo="1.0"/>


<mx:Label id="label4" text="Hello World" fontSize="24" 

     hideEffect="{dissolveOut}" showEffect="{dissolveIn}"/>

Here's a running example:

As with the Blur effect, using the Dissolve effect does not increase the SWF file size because you don't have to embed the font symbols.

This ZIP file (2KB) contains the complete source MXML files for the three working examples in this blog entry.

Posted by Matthew J. Horn at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Adobe web team is rolling out new functionality to help Flex coders find the help resources they need.

Currently, the "Ion" project consists of a customized search engine that is populated with the best of the Flex-related resources on the web. You can access this new search feature directly at http://community.adobe.com/ion/. You can also search it by using the "Community-Powered Search" input on the Flex DevNet site.

Also part of Ion is the back end for commenting on Livedocs and DevNet articles. Prior to this, there was no commenting on DevNet articles, and the Livedocs commenting engine was much more restrictive.

This is just the beginning of the Ion project.

Posted by Matthew J. Horn at 01:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

All users have access to the Flex 3 SDK source code. You can view the ActionScript source files for classes like Button and DataGrid. The source code is in the frameworks\projects\framework\src directory of your Flex installation. The source code for the data visualization projects does not come pre-installed, however. If you have a Flex Builder Professional license key, you can extract the data visualization source code, which include the charting controls, the AdvancedDataGrid classes, the OLAP classes, and the automation classes. To view your Flex Builder license key, select Manage Flex Licenses from the Help menu.

To extract the data visualization source code, you use the DMV-source.jar file. This file is located in the SDK's lib directory. If you are using Flex Builder, the lib directory is located at {Flex Builder 3}\sdks\3.0.0\lib.

The syntax to extract the data visualization source code is as follows:

> java -jar DMV-source.jar {license-file-location} {output-location}

The first argument is the location of the license.properties file. This file must contain a valid Flex Builder 3 Professional license key. The second parameter is the location that you want the data visualization source code to be extracted to.

If you installed Flex Builder 3 Professional, then the license.properties file is located at the following locations, depending on your operating system:

• Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Flex\
• Mac OS: /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flex/
• Linux: ~/.adobe/Flex/

The following example extracts the data visualization source code to the c:\temp\dataviz_source directory on Windows:

java -jar c:\Flex Builder 3\sdks\3.0.0\lib\DMV-source.jar 
     "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Adobe\Flex\" 
     c:\temp\dataviz_source

If you have a valid Flex Builder 3 Professional license key but did not install Flex Builder, then you can create a license.properties file anywhere, and point to it when you use the DMV-source.jar file. The syntax of the license.properties file is as follows:

flexbuilder3={license_key}

Posted by Matthew J. Horn at 01:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here's a new example in the charting doc. It shows how someone might use some or all of an HTML page they load via an HTTPService tag as a data provider for their charting component. It includes logic to extract just the data from the target page.

The benefit to this is that if you have a wiki or blog that you can edit via a browser, you can build and update a data page without having to hit a database. The code extracts specially-tagged data from the HTML page, so even if it's part of a larger block of HTML, you can still extract just the data.

One thing to note: The target domain in this example works because it has a crossdomain.xml file. If you want to load a page from your own target domain, you must be sure that your target domain has a crossdomain.xml file in place, and that that policy file lets the domain on which the Flex app is running request data from it.

Here's the running example:

Here's the data page that drives this chart:
http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/exchangingdata/html/dataPage.html

You can download the source MXML file here:
HTMLDataProvider.zip (1KB)

The exact location of the data page is passed into the application as a flashVars property. To change the data page, you only have to edit the HTML wrapper for the SWF file.

In the HTML wrapper, we pass the target HTML page as a param in the <object> tag:

<param name="flashVars" value="dataPage=http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/exchangingdata/html/dataPage.html" />

And again as an attribute of the <embed> tag:

flashVars="dataPage=http://www.shallowpondestates.com/misc/dataPage.html"

Note that you can view the source of this blog entry page to see the complete object/embed tags.

In the Flex app, the data page is read from the Application's application.parameters property:

dataPage = Application.application.parameters.dataPage;

To initially get the page's contents into the Flex app, we use an HTTPService object:

<mx:HTTPService id="serviceInput" 

        resultFormat="text" 

        url="{dataPage}"

    />

To get the HTML in a single string we get the lastResult property of the HTTPService in the ResultEvent handler:

var htmlBlob:String = serviceInput.lastResult.toString();

And to extract just the portion of the data page that we need (the part between the "data starts here" and "data ends here" comments), we use the slice() method:

htmlBlob = htmlBlob.slice( htmlBlob.indexOf("<!-- data starts here -->", 0) + 25, htmlBlob.length );

htmlBlob = htmlBlob.slice( 0, htmlBlob.indexOf("<!-- data ends here -->", 0) );

We then do a couple more passes on the remaining HTML string to replace HTML entities with angle brackets, so that we will end up with well-formed XML:

var tagPattern:RegExp = /<[^<>]*>/g;  

htmlBlob = htmlBlob.replace(tagPattern, "");

			

var ltPattern:RegExp = /&lt;/g;

htmlBlob = htmlBlob.replace(ltPattern, "<");

			

var gtPattern:RegExp = /&gt;/g;

htmlBlob = htmlBlob.replace(gtPattern, ">");

At this point, we just need to pass the XML to the XMLList constructor so that it can be used as a data provider in the chart:

chartData = new XMLList(htmlBlob);

That's it. If you compile and deploy this app, you can use the provided data page, or create your own. If your data page is on the same domain as the application, then you do not need a crossdomain.xml file.

Posted by Matthew J. Horn at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)