Hi all, hope this is the right list to post this type of question.. I'm sure someone can help me out.
I'm new to Flex and coming from a web/ajax background I'm struggling a bit with the 'statefulness' of flex, compared to the relatively 'statelessness' of your typical web page. Basically, I'm looking at building a flex app as a learning experience. The flex app will be based on an existing web app at work. Put simply, the application is used to allow people to submit wines into a competition. A submission consists of several wine entries. Each entry contains details about the wine composition, producer & production details, retail details & stockists.. With the main application view, I want to show the user (the submitter) the wines they have submitted in a datagrid. The datagrid will have colums such as the wine name, vintage, producer, entry status (paid, unpaid) and entry date. When the user selects an entry from the winelist datagrid, I want to show the selected entry details in an accordion view (with headings such as entry status, wine composition, producer details, etc). Each panel in the accordion will contain the various form fields to allow the user to modify the entry. Quite straightforward, right? I want to use value objects - but I have some questions about how they should be used: 1) Can or should a VO contain references to or collections of other VOs? For example, a wine has a producer. I have a wineVO and a producerVO. Should I do something like wineVO.producerVO.name = "Producer Name". 2) Should I transfer the entire submission (a submission is made up of several wine entries aka WineVOs) to Flex in one big VO, then let the user manipulate the submission VO (by adding, modifying entries) and then save it back to the server? Is that good practice? 3) A wine is produced in a specific country. On the wine details form (when editing an existing entry), I want a combo box of countries, with the production country selected. So.. I have a VO called 'countries' in my model which contains a collection of CountryVOs (id, name) that the combo box is bound to. Should my WineVO contain a CountryVO or just the ID of the production country? What's the best way to get the combo box to bind to the selected country in the WineVO but having the dataprovider pointing to model.CountriesVO? Sorry for the long post - I've reviewed a lot of the Cairngorm examples, but they tend to deal with simple problems (like adding a contact) and I'm finding it hard to build something a little more complicated on top of their foundations. Any advice appreciated. Justin
