Amy's Flex Diary

What's new in Flash Builder 4.5 for Test Driven Development

2011-05-19T18:28:00.000-07:00

I love Test Driven Development (TDD), but there are some parts of it that I've found pretty painful in the released versions of Flash/Flex Builder. Given the benefits of TDD, I've chosen to grit my teeth and just bear with it. Last month I went to 360Flex, which showcased some of the productivity enhancements in Flash Builder 4.5, and I am thrilled to see that Adobe has addressed these pain

Patience is a Vitrue (or something like that)

2011-03-06T10:50:00.002-08:00

I admit it, I have been neglecting this blog. In part, that is because I've been in the midst of some really exciting changes.Before I get into what has been going on, some background. My husband, Steve Howard, moved all the way from the UK to Mississippi to marry yours truly. Soon after he moved here, he got a contract working for a company in the North Atlanta area, and that company extended a

Installing AMFPHP to Windows 7

2010-05-22T09:22:00.000-07:00

I was excited to read about the release of AMFPHP 1.9 in February, but I didn't need to install it until a couple of weeks ago, when I was working on refactoring my Lazy Loading Tree example to take advantage of Maté. I wound up burning up almost an entire day due to permission problems on AMFPHP that were difficult to track down.It turns out that something about my setup, whether it's Windows 7

Sample code for OOP + Timeline InsideRIA Article

2010-04-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

Several people asked me for code samples for my Combining the Timeline with OOP As3 in Flash that appeared on InsideRIA on April 7. So I've put together two examples, which produce a file that looks like this:The example files do the same thing, just through different methods. One listens for the added event on the root document to start tweening the smiley faces as they are added, 10 frames

Debugging Responder Result Functions

2010-02-01T18:52:00.000-08:00

Lots of times when we use AsyncTokens with Responders, something will go wrong between when the call is made and when it returns. Usually if there is a problem, the fault handler will fire. Because of this, it's fairly straightforward to get information on what has happened in the fault responder function by looking at the FaultEvent's properties, such as the fault property.But what about when

RIAdventure Inspiration

2009-12-16T13:16:00.000-08:00

So we're just back from the RIAdventure cruise/conference, and I have to say it was just what the doctor ordered for me. The speakers and attendees were all top notch, and I felt like a little sponge, soaking up ideas from them.One set of ideas I'd just started reading about before going to the conference was blitting. In my roles as eLearning or Application developer, this wasn't something

Flex Template Component

2009-11-16T07:18:00.000-08:00

This week on InsideRIA, I blogged about Flex Template components. My mandate for that blog is to talk more about ideas than showing code, but I had a feeling that someone would ask to see code on this one, so I put together an example of code that is similar to the component I show a screen shot of in that post for the curious.The example linked to below has View Source enabled:Flex Template

RIA Adventure Conference/cruise

2009-10-27T15:30:00.001-07:00

I'm really excited to be signed up for the RIAAdventure Cruise. Not only do I get to meet or renew acquaintance with such familiar names as Doug McCune, Ted Patrick, or Ryan Steward, but I get to do it on a cruise ship making its way from port to port in Mexico!This is going to be so much fun!

Where I've Been

2009-04-15T19:56:00.000-07:00

You've probably noticed that I haven't posted much lately. This is because in January, I was hired to do contract work in ASP Classic and SQL Server for a company called voip.com. While working for them, I've done a couple of Flash projects, but no Flex so far. They also keep me hopping pretty well, so I haven't had as much time for blogging as I'd like.I also recently signed up to do a weekly

New Adobe User Group

2009-02-03T13:13:00.000-08:00

A little known fact is that I met my husband, Steve Howard on the old macromedia user forums. At one point, he and I were both members of Team Macromedia, then we made the transition together to being Adobe Community Experts. Adobe and I had some "differences of opinion," so I am no longer a Community Expert. However, we both still have a close and friendly relationship with Adobe.He applied

Example of casting contents of swfLoader to an interface

2009-01-29T20:15:00.000-08:00

Last weekend, someone asked for ane example of being able to load a swf generated from a Flex Application that implements an interface and being able to load a Flash swf that implements the same interface. Once the swf's are loaded, the poster wanted to be able to cast them to the interface and then use the interface to call methods on the loaded swf.So, I've posted an example of casting

Lazy Loading Tree example file posted

2009-01-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

A lot of people on the flexcoders yahoo list have asked about creating a tree that uses a custom DataDescriptor to allow lazy loading of the data. In other words, it gets the first level of data when the application loads, but does not call for the children of the branches until each node is open. I had a bit of down time this week, so I thought I'd put one together.This example actually has two

Before you start with AMFPHP...

2009-01-11T07:36:00.001-08:00

Last week, I had some down time, so I decided to create an AMFPHP example and post it to my website. I have a Windows account with my web host, but they do support php, so I figured it would work. I successfully created the example on my local machine, which I will blog about tomorrow, but I won't be posting the working swf, unfortunately.Let me tell you why, so that if you need to post to a

Why I love development perspective

2008-12-04T09:33:00.000-08:00

I have to tell you, I spend a lot of time debugging. So for a long time, I just left Flex Builder in Debugging persoective unless I needed to work in design view for some reason. But then I realized that Development Perspective gave me more vertical space in the code window, and I started switching to it more often. I'll admit, that's not exciting enough to post about.But once I started working

Implementing IEventDispatcher

2008-11-18T10:05:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had to have a class that took arguments in its constructor and also was able to dispatch events. Rather than trying to extend EventDispatcher and worry about separating the arguments the rest of the class needed from the ones EventDispatcher needed, I decided to implement IEventDispatcher. Problem was, I hadn't done this in a while, and I couldn't remember the right way to do this and

More thoughts on Remoting

2008-11-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working with AMF for the first time this week. I'd read about using AsyncTokens to be able to determine which call to a service resulted in which result, so from the very beginning I'd intended to use this. The problem I had was that when I looked at the docs for RemoteObject, I couldn't find anything that actually returns an AsyncToken. So at first I

Thoughts on remoting

2008-11-13T17:44:00.000-08:00

The past week or so, I've been doing something that's new to me--retrieving objects using AMFPHP and integrating them with Flex. In the meantime, I've found that there are some things that are hard to find out about the whole process, so I thought I'd make a note of them here.First, all the examples I could find easily used NetConnection. The code on these was so similar that I think there was

Filtering Bookmarks, Warnings, and Errors in Flex Builder

2008-10-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

Up until recently, I almost never kept more than one project open in Flex Builder at the same time. The reason was simple: if I was looking at Project A, I found it very confusing to see bookmarks or warnings from other projects in the Bookmarks or Problems panel. Several months ago, I looked for a way to filter this, but for some reason I couldn't find it. Last week, I was more successful. If

Moving from Authorware to Flex

2008-10-01T13:37:00.000-07:00

I started out as an Authorware developer, and one reason I am now doing Flex is that Adobe announced the End of Development of Authorware just over a year ago. I saw that Flex offered a lot of the advantages of Authorware--it does a great job of integrating various media into a cohesive whole and you can make an application that runs from the web or the desktop from approximately the same

GroupingCollection example featuring GroupingFunction

2008-09-26T14:06:00.000-07:00

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

Extended DataGrid with StyleFunction Example Posted

2008-09-24T12:48:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, I posted an example of an extended TileList that adds the styleFunction I've become so fond of with AdvancedDataGrid. I decided I'd look and see if I could do the same with DataGrid, and I found that, while it was challenging, I was able to do it. So I've posted my new extended DataGrid_withStyle and StyleableRenderer classes for you to use and enjoy. As always, View Source is

Flex FAQ posted

2008-09-11T19:46:00.000-07:00

In the past few weeks, I've started trying to help out around the macromedia.flex.general_discussion forum by answering questions, and I realized that the same questions were coming up over and over. Rather than post the full FAQ in a mammoth blog post I'd have to come back and update over and over, I thought I'd simply make a PDF on my main website that I could keep current and just link to it

Looking for Work

2008-08-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

So far, most of the Flex work I've done has been Flex applications embedded in Authorware applications. My current Authorware and Flex project is winding down, and I'm looking for a purely Flex project to work on next. If you have benefitted from this blog and you know of a Flex job, especially a telecommuting job, please either contact me or pass on my information to whoever's hiring.Thanks! :

TileList with styleFunction

2008-08-18T08:07:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a requirement to have buttons displayed in a grid with different color backgrounds based on the underlying data. Thus, the TileList_withStyle was born. The TileList_withStyle is simply a TileList extended to have a styleFunction. Note that I mostly just copied and modified the styleFunction code from the AdvancedDataGrid control. You can probably use the same technique to add a

Charting Example

2008-08-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, I said I'd compile some thoughts about charting. Normally, this would mean that I'd talk about charts in a general way. I'm not much on posting code, mainly because I'm terrified that I'll post something that will lead someone who's even more newbie than I am down the wrong path. Instead, I prefer to talk about code in general terms, then let people go off and make whatever

Resources for Learning Flex

2008-07-28T07:57:00.000-07:00

I started this blog to document the hurdles I was finding as I was learning Flex 3. In the year since I started blogging on Flex, this task has become much easier. I wanted to take a minute to talk about two things that I've noticed that are real improvements. First, the Start Page appears to update itself occasionally.I've posted before that I had problems learning to use the debugger due to

Some thoughts on charting

2008-07-27T12:02:00.000-07:00

This past week, I made my first foray into the world of Flex charting, and I'll have to say that I found it a pleasant surprise. From all the comments I've seen from others using charting, I had expected a difficult, painful process. My experience was quite the opposite. This is the first time in my year or so of using Flex that I've been able to accomplish anything significant without having

Getting Help in Flex Builder

2008-07-26T18:13:00.000-07:00

When I open the Help Contents in Flex Builder 3, the first thing on the page is Tip! Learn how to filter and reduce your search results by reading "Searching Help." The problem is that on my installation of FB3, this is a dead link. I checked it this week on my husband's installation, and his link is dead as well. I eventually figured out what this page would have told me, but I feel like I was

Debugging itemRenderers

2008-07-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

You may have notced that I have spent a lot of time chasing down issues with itemRenderers. It always frustrated me that you could get information on the parent of any component, but I could never figure out how to find out information on the renderers being displayed by a List based control. I finally realized that if I set a break point in a scope that had a reference to a List control, I

Are you Flex-ing in Europe or the UK?

2008-07-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

The European eLearning Summit (EeLS) is offering quality Flex training at a great price at Nottingham University on August 22nd. The class will be taught by Matthew Boles, and pricing starts at UK£50 (plus VAT), and the price includes lunch.

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 5)

2008-07-03T11:23:00.000-07:00

Up to part 4, I've been talking about the AdvancedDataGrid itself and the properties it has that are supposed to make your life easier, like styleFunction and iconFunction. And they do, once you understand them. But now I'd like to turn my attention to the data source I was using to drive my AdvancedDataGrid (ADG).My AdvancedDataGrid is being used as a menu on an eLearning application. The

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 4)

2008-07-02T11:50:00.000-07:00

So, in part 3, I gave up on my extension of the AdvancedDataGridItemRenderer altogether and set my extended AdvancedDataGridGroupItemRenderer as both the itemRenderer and groupItemRenderer on the AdvancedDataGrid. This gave me a nice uniform appearance on all of my itemRenderers. So I set off happily to write my iconFunction.This turned out to work exactly as advertised, with only one hitch--my

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 3)

2008-07-01T12:44:00.000-07:00

Review Part 2The author of the blog post I originally found that inspired this journey said that this method would not cause the selection and rollover indicators to be obscured in the same way as this method. But I really wanted to be able to see these indicators, rather than a tiny edge around each row. So I was determined that I was going to get my AdvancedDatagridItemRenderer to allow me to

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 2)

2008-06-30T11:51:00.000-07:00

Review Part 1I'd found a neat little sample that shows how to change the background color on the row by extending AdvancedDataGridItemRenderer (ADGIR) to set the existing background and backgroundColor properties based on a style set on the component.I had no trouble copying this, but I found that for some reason the entire first column stubbornly refused to pick up my carefully applied color.

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 1)

2008-06-29T10:58:00.000-07:00

This last week, I had my first experience with the AdvancedDataGrid component. I knew I needed to have multi-column heirarchical data display. I also needed to be able to dynamically color and also set an icon each row based on the content of the data item. I scoured the docs for a component that would meet these requirements, and the ADG's styleFunction and iconFunction seemed like they would

Using a CSS TypeSelector with an itemRenderer

2008-06-03T19:37:00.001-07:00

Today, I had more fun with item renderers. I had a component I was working on to try to prototype some new functionality, and I had set up styles for it in the declaration of the Application tag. If I put my component in a container in the main Application, the style came through fine. If I used it as an itemRenderer of a List based class, only the text styles worked.It seems that

Another good itemRenderer Resource

2008-05-20T08:45:00.000-07:00

The longer I use Flex, the more firmly I believe that the key to understanding it is the component life cycle. Specifically, the life cycle as it applies to item renderers. Today on Flex Coders, Douglas Knudsen posted a link to this great presentation on the component life cycle by Eli Greenspan. I can't for the life of me figure out how to bookmark to a pdf, but if I post a link here, I'll be

Great ItemRenderer Resource

2008-05-15T08:45:00.000-07:00

I really struggle with itemRenderers--what goes where to make what you want to occur happen when you want it to. So I've been talking to various people and reading, reading, reading trying to make sense of it all. From the posts on the yahoo FlexCoders group, it seems like I'm not the only one experiencing confusion.I think the biggest problem is that there don't seem to be many "from the ground

Working with Dates in AS3

2008-05-13T16:24:00.000-07:00

The Date examples that come with Flex (and, presumably, Flash) are all very well and good, but to me they don't seem to be very...practical. And it doesn't help that the documentation doesn't provide any clues about how to do simple things like, oh, figuring out how many days there are in a month. There's probably very good code for these things in opensource projects like the Flex scheduler, but

Is the HorizontalList faster than an HBox with a Repeater?

2008-04-25T08:01:00.000-07:00

The Help files that come with Flex Builder claim that the HorizontalList control can have better performance than a HBox with a repeater:"...performance of a HorizontalList control can be better than the combination of an HBox container and a Repeater object because the HorizontalList control only instantiates the objects that fit in its display area."The truth is, this statement is false. The

eLearning Guild Online Forum on Flex

2008-04-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

The eLearning Guild does online forums from time to time that are like conferences that you attend from the comfort of your home or office. I am very excited that my first conference presentation on Flex will be at their online forum Selecting, Combining, and Using Authoring Tools. I will be presenting on strategies for migrating from Authorware to Flex.Hope to see you there!

Importing Packages in AS3

2008-03-19T10:07:00.000-07:00

Even the most simple task seems to take me forever in Flex, since I have to troll through reams of documentation to make sure I understand the concepts involved. This morning I came across something in one of my references that went something like this:"Because this class is in the same package as the other class you want to use, you don't need to add an import statement in order to use it." I

Easy when you know how

2008-03-18T08:50:00.000-07:00

I think I spent a couple of hours yesterday scouring the Flex docs to figure out how to make a tab on a TabNavigator disabled. And it seems like I'm not the only one. After messing with it for a while, I decided to set the enabled property on the child form to false. Which worked.I went back to the docs and discovered that it had been there all the time:If you disable a child of a TabNavigator

Comparing XML nodes of the same name with E4X

2008-03-10T19:52:00.000-07:00

I recently found a situation that the Flex E4X documentation didn't cover, and I couldn't find an example for ActionScript 3 or JavaScript that covered it. Essentially, I had XML in the data property of an itemRenderer that looked something like this:

Order of Events for ItemRenderers

2007-11-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

I suspect that I'll be blogging a lot about ItemRenderers, because it seems that there's a ton that can go wrong with them and lots of stuff to learn before you can get it right. A good starting point in learning about them is Alex Harui's Blog. I found this source a bit misleading in my current project, because it suggests that you should run your init code in the dataChange event listener

Unhandled Error

2007-11-09T17:13:00.000-08:00

I am often trying to do sort of off-the-wall things in Flex, because I am slowly building new functionality in Flex that gets plugged into Authorware. When enough of the functionality exists in Flex, we'll rebuild the shell logic to finally port it all to Flex. But for right now I find myself doing things I suspect the Flex team never intended.For instance, last week I was sending XML in

Undocumented Image Control Properties

2007-10-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

For over a week, I've been struggling to make an image gallery similar to the one here. The problem I was having is that the images were all different sizes, and when they were displayed on the screen they were jumping all over the screen. Let me go back to the beginning...It seems that the Image control doesn't scale properly unless you set its size as a percentage of the container size. So, if

Dispatching Events

2007-08-22T11:57:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking I'm probably extra stupid, but I kind of got the impression from the Event handling docs that if you wanted to send out your own events, you had to have your own events class. It seemed to me there was something magical in the constants defining event names in your events class that somehow made the events so named "your" events. It turns out that if you want to dispatch an event "

Modules for eLearning

2007-08-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

I've written before about how difficult I've found it to figure out how to use Modules for eLearning style structures within Flex. It seems to me I may have hit upon an approach that works. The new documentation on Modules has an example that shows creating an Interface so that you have a known "contract" between the Module and the parent container. The example shows how to pass information into

AS3 Basics

2007-08-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

I've been struggling a lot with the Flex documentation (can ya tell?), and a lot of it, I think, is because the people who write docs know the whole thing inside and out. So they don't realize that before they go off all half cocked telling you how to write the code in a package, they should probably take a moment or two to tell you where to put the package, what to call the package so it will

ELearning Approaches

2007-08-09T15:21:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get my head around the best way to use Flex for eLearning, and I'm truly having to start with the basics. The average computer based course has an interface which may show some front matter, usually shows a menu, and then will show the content. After that, it may show a summary or have a quiz. But all of these things "live" in the same interface. Sounds simple, right?In Authorware,

Application vs. WindowedApplication

2007-07-26T13:58:00.000-07:00

When I first saw Flex and what it could do, I was really excited. I started my working life as a graphic designer, so I'm always interested in the visual possibilities of a new tool. One of the things I spotted right away is that you can make an AIR application that floats on top of the desktop, with a drop shadow and full alpha transparency.I trotted off to try to make my first AIR app with

Calling Flex from Authorware

2007-07-25T14:25:00.000-07:00

So I finally had my datagrid calling my ASP page, which squirted out XML. I embedded my Flex swf and could not for the life of me figure out how to call the functionality from Authorware. I did a lot of Googling and banging my head up against a wall, and here is what I came up with:CallSprite(@"Flash", #CallString, "CallFunction('<

Flex reorders URL String Parameters

2007-07-25T14:05:00.000-07:00

So now I'm trying to capture the Flex things I've learned in the last couple of weeks with Flex, and most of them are just a big amorphous blur. One thing I do remember is that my ASP page broke when called from Flex. Turns out that Flex doesn't leave the request parameters in the order you put them in when sending to ASP, even when you hard code the full URL string. No I have no idea either

Introduction

2007-07-25T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hello, my name is Amy and I'm an Authorware-holic. The thing is, Adobe has been deafeningly silent on the future of Authorware, so I'm checking out other tools that can make a web application and a desktop application from the same source code. I have spent the last couple of weeks trying to learn Flex, and honestly I find it quite frustrating.The Flex documentation, like the documentation of