GroupingCollection example featuring GroupingFunction

Several months ago, I built a dashboard example for a client that featured a calendar with a month view like you'd see in a paper calendar on one side and a week view on the other side. I wound up writing some fairly complex classes to handle the different breakdowns in how the data displayed. I also wrote a custom renderer for the calendar page and a different one for the week view.

And then I had to do some work with the AdvancedDataGrid and fell in love with the way this component "thinks" about data, with its HierarchicalData, HierarchicalCollectionView, and GroupingCollection. And, of course, I adore its styleFunction, as you might have guessed from my earlier TileList_withStyle and DataGrid_withStyle classes.

A few weeks ago, someone posted an example that showed a way to use GroupingCollections with controls that were not AdvancedDataGrid or Tree components. Let me tell you, that got my little cogs twirling. If only (thought I) you could use a function to decide how the items in a GroupingCollection grouped. Then you could use it to group dates into years, months, weeks, whatever floated your boat. So I went digging into the docs, and found that the GroupingField actually does have such a property.

And so the GroupingFunction example was born. This example illustrates how you can create a single array of objects that contain the dates to use for a Calendar application, then group and filter the data in different ways by using that array as the source for multiple ArrayCollections and GroupingCollections. These allow you to display that data in several different ways without a lot of manual parsing.

It also illustrates the following concepts:

• Using a single itemRenderer with the TileList_withStyle component to present different appearances based on the styleFunction you use.


• Using a Repeater to populate an Accordion control based on a data source


• Using a single child component that gets reused between the children of
  the Accordion

I'd also like to point out that I'd have never been able to create this example if I weren't still looking for work. I'm sure you're probably loving being the recipient of all these free examples, but please return the favor by passing my name on to anyone you know who is hiring :-).



Updated October 21, 2008:

I changed the itemRenderer to show how you can set the blendMode on text to apply effects to it without embedding the font. I only set the blendMode on the lower label , so that the difference would be apparent.