January 2009 Archives

Here is the updated documentation on the Flex Gumbo ASDoc tool. This documentation includes information on using ASDoc to process MXML files, and has many new examples showing how to run the tool.

Download the PDF: Using ASDoc

This is not a major announcement, but it's got a touch of cool factor and represents an improvement to about 200 doc examples. The charting examples in Flex documentation have been updated to use real-time data served up from a MySQL database. They connect to the database via an HTTPService tag, and then use the results as the data provider for the charts.

The server that hosts the data is located at:
aspexamples.adobe.com

The following list provides links to the new example data. The link in parentheses provides the XML output of the request. The best way to view the source data as it is used by Flex is to click the XML link, and then select View > Source in your browser:

• budget.aspx (budget-xml.aspx)
• expenses.aspx (expenses-xml.aspx)
• medals.aspx (medals-xml.aspx)
• networth.aspx (networth-xml.aspx)
• stocks.aspx (stocks-xml.aspx)
• widgets.aspx (widgets-xml.aspx)

To use these URLs as data sources in your apps, you can do something like the following:

<mx:HTTPService 

  id="srv" 

  url="http://aspexamples.adobe.com/chart_examples/expenses-xml.aspx"

/>

Be sure to call the service's send() method when your app is finished loading (in the creationComplete event handler):

creationComplete="srv.send()"

And then set the value of the chart's dataProvider property to something like this:

dataProvider="{srv.lastResult.data.result}" 

The updated examples won't appear in the Flex documentation until the next time it is generated for the public. This will likely be for the Flex 4 ("Gumbo") beta. But the data is available now for your testing.