Hi FlexCoders,
I have recently discovered the wonders of developing RIAs with Flex /
FlexBuilder and have completely decided to use the same in further development
efforts on my part. With a little .NET knowledge, I decided to venture out on
the path of Flex by combining it with some wisdom I gained from developing
using .NET.
As I have been working a lot on business and data driven application, I tried
to re-create one screen of an application which I have previously done in
ASP.Net into Flex. Nothing really fancy, just a simple screen which contains a
datagrid listing of some parts references, with basic CRUD capabilities, sort
and filter, and generation of report to print out the listing.
With tremendous resources coming from this group, I was able to accomplish a
little application which does what I first intended to do:
1. Display data in a datagrid control.
2. Provide sort (built-in to the datagrid) and search and filter mechanism to
the datagrid.
3. Provide basic CRUD capabilities to the application.
4. Generating a report for the datagrid.
Take note that the context of my application is a simple Flex on the front end,
connnecting to a .NET webservice on the backend (for data/CRUD
facilities/reporting facilities). The SWF application is simply embedded on an
HTML page (copying the HTML generated from the FlexBuilder IDE).
I was able to utilize the webservice, combined with Crystal Report (which comes
built-in in Visual Studio) to create a report of the list which the application
displays. The report is processed and a PDF file is generated which I am
opening with the Flex application via an ExternalInterface javascript call to
open the said PDF file report in another browser window.
The way I was able to accomplish this is a bit of a hack. What I did was in my
datagrid's provider, which is an ArrayCollection, I created a string, which is
delimited by special characters to denote a field/column entry. For Example I
have the following data on my ArrayCollection:
ID Description
01 Lakers
02 Magic
03 Nuggets
04 Cavaliers
05 Celtics
What I did was then parse this data into a delimited string such that my string
variable would look like:
01|Lakers||02|Magic||03|Nuggets||04|Cavaliers||05|Celtics||
This string, can be easily parsed in .NET using some simple string functions
and be pushed to a Crystal Report document, to generate the desired report.
I feel that this is probably not the "BEST" way of doing this. I tried
initially to pass an XML delimmited string, but .NET seems to read XML
differently(?) from Flex.
I would certainly appreciate any comments and suggestions on the way to achieve
this properly. I am a bit lost on the XML data interchange between .NET and
Flex. I am looking to use the ArrayCollection but I am still uncertain on
what/how I would match it with the .NET data type.
Looking forward to your inputs.
Thanks and appreciating this group a lot,
Angelo
