Hi Jeffrey, You shouldn't attempt to send UI components from one app to another; you just need to send enough info to the peer for it to simulate the same behaviors as you're doing locally. There's no out-of-the-box support for synchronizing the UI of your Flex app across peers.
Try sending identifiers for the component you're dragging, as well as for the drop target. In your messageHandler() method in the receiving app, use these identifiers to get references to the local UI components that match, and reparent the 'dragged' component under the local 'drop target' component. The reparenting could be simple and direct, and you could try to animate it once you get the basic scenario working if you wanted (you know where the 'dragged' component starts and where it ends up so maybe you could do a straight line animation to simulate the original drag and drop). Sorry, don't have time to code up anything at the moment. Seth From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Walker Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 3:33 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Flex Messaging Service + Drag and Drop List Component Thanks Seth, this helps a lot. But I am unclear on exactly what should be sent to the server inside of AsyncMessage. Below I have my drop handler and message handler. I am very new to Flex and I do not understand what to do in the message handler (i.e., where to set the received data) so that the consumers can actually see the drag an drop action happening. What do you mean by animate the item dragged along the simple path? I am using the built in drag and drop capabilities of ther List component. Can you please help me with my code? Thanks private function dragDropHandler(event:DragEvent):void { // Get the drop target component var dropTarget:List = event.currentTarget as List; //Get dragged item var draggedItem:CustomImageRenderer = event.draggedItem as CustomImageRenderer; //Send the message to the server message = new AsyncMessage(); message.headers.dropTarget = dropTarget; message.headers.draggedItem = draggedItem; producer.send(message); } private function messageHandler(event:MessageEvent):void { //WHAT DO I DO HERE? } -- Jeffrey On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Seth Hodgson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: You can put anything you like into the body, or headers, of an AsyncMessage; a string, a number, an anonymous Object, a typed Object (if you use a typed Object be sure to tag it with [RemoteClass] metadata). You can control which subscribed Consumers receive the message by using the Consumer.selector property (a SQL-92 expression evaluated on the server against the headers of incoming messages; if the message headers satisfy the expression the message will be delivered to the Consumer), or by using the Consumer.subtopic property to subscribe to a subtopic (or range of subtopics) within a destination and using the Producer.subtopic property to control which specific subtopic sent messages go to. When building 'screen-sharing' style applications like this, you need to really keep network latency in mind. Some GUI frameworks will 'summarize' events before handing off to even local processing (i.e. collapsing a bunch of individual key strokes into a summary string containing all the characters typed since the last event dispatch and just dispatching that single event). This becomes even more important when you're considering sending lots of high frequency events over the network to peers. In this case, I'd recommend sending a single message to subscribed peers on drop complete, indicating which component was dragged and dropped along with its final location. You can then either just reparent the corresponding component immediately on the receiving peer, or animate it along a simple path. There are lots of options with this sort of thing, but you shouldn't try to generate and send a message for each pixel it is dragged. Hope that helps, Seth From: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of jeffreyr6915 Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2008 11:01 PM To: flexcoders@yahoogroups.com Subject: [flexcoders] Flex Messaging Service + Drag and Drop List Component I have a 2 list components in which I have enabled drag and drop (dragEnabled="true" dropEnabled="true" dragMoveEnabled="true" dragDrop="dragDropHandler(event)"). So, I am able to drag and drop the List items (which I have a custom itemRenderer for). I am also using flex messaging service (Flex data services) so that a change made in one connected client/browser is propagated to all other connected browsers. I would like to be able to drag an item from one list to another (in one browser) and see that drag and drop happen (as it is happening) in all other connected browsers. I know that I need to send an AsyncMessage to the server via a producer, and receive from the server via a consumer. Question: What do I include in the async message in order to see the list items drag/drop as it is happening in all connected browsers? Can someone help me with code/example? Thanks
