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.

Musings on AdvancedDataGrid (Part 5)

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 application has various tasks that the user must complete. Once a task is complete, it is shown again in review mode, which provides the student with remediation on what he did wrong or right. The student can also view reports of what he did in a given task. So each task will be available in three modes: normal, review, and analysis. The mode will be determined by the top-level container.
To this end, I created an array of MenuContainer Value Objects (VO) that contained a number of Task VO's. I assigned these to a HeirarchicalData dataProvider in the ADG. I immediately realized that the itemClick event just gave me the Task VO, and the Task knew nothing about its parent (and rightly so). Apparently, the itemRenderer also knew nothing about where the Task fell in the data structure, nor anything else in the ADG.

I realized it was a slippery problem, since even if I were to loop through the MenuContainers and find the Task that was selected, I would only find the first instance of it. So I decided to wrap my Task class in another class that had two properties, task and UID. In this class, TaskUID, I simply used UIDUtil to create a UID for this instance of the task.

Once I had that accomplished, I decided to take one more squint at the docs before I built a function to loop through and find my TaskUID. I trolled the language reference only on the word hierarchical. I'd looked at the HierarchicalCollectionView before, but the description implies that this is for making flat collections look hierarchical (heck, it actually says it!). However, this class does include a method, getParentItem(), which looked perfect for my needs.

In a wild leap of faith, I cast the event.currentTarget.dataProvider from the itemClick event from HierarchicalData to HierarchicalCollectionView and the method worked! It gave me a reference to the MenuContainer from the TaskUID. I have no idea what the differences are between those classes, so I wouldn't guarantee all methods would work when you do this kind of casting, but this worked for me!