18
Jun
2008

Flex and AIR updates

A little while ago I got around to building my version of an alert tool sampler, using it as an exercise to learn Cairngorm. (The documentation for which I have found particularly poor with the exception of a few gems such as David Tucker’s excellent Cairngorm ‘Getting started’ tutorials.)

Typically AIR developers will all want to take advantage of the Update capability, but in it’s original form requires some work. Rich Tretola’s UpdateManager did the job, but I wanted more programmatic control, interception of events and a slightly different UI work-flow, and set about creating my own.  Just as that phase of the work is completed, I find Adobe’s Update Framework on labs which although beta, does a much better job. I wish it was there a week ago.

Also, I just took the opportunity to update to AIR 1.1. Unfortunately updating Flex to use the new AIR is a little messy (in that it requires manually copying some files rather than running an installer) and means moving to the 3.0.2 stable build of the Flex SDK. However it is not difficult and the instructions to follow are here.

Posted by creacog in Adobe, AIR, Flex 3, Flex Builder, 1 comment
12
Jun
2008

CS4 betas

I’m not usually one for echoing release announcements. Herewith one minor exception. With the arrival of a number CS4 betas on labs I was please to see “Subversion integration” being a new feature of DreamWeaver CS4. After a history of making simple Zip snapshot backups, and more recently using subversion along with the “Cloak/Uncloak SCM directories” extention and client tools such as SvnX, and SCPlugin it will be interesting to see how well the integration has been done. Looking good from the description.

Update: Unfortunately looks like Subversion is only supported through a server in this release. I really need it to be able to use the “file:///” protocol to access repositories on my local system without having to set up a server. Here is my entry on the Dreamweaver Beta Forum, feel free to add to it if you have opinions one way or the other.

Posted by creacog in Adobe, CS4, DreamWeaver, Subversion, 4 comments
16
Apr
2008

Flex / AIR / DataGrid / itemEditor bug?

If you are using DataGrid in a Flex/AIR application, the chances are you will at some stage hit the following RunTime error…

TypeError: Error #1010: A term is undefined and has no properties.

.. with a traceback indicating the error occurred within DataGrid.as. At which point you will stare at your own code for a while and wonder why.

In my circumstance I pinned this down to clearing the contents of the data provider and repopulating when there is an item renderer active on the DataGrid. A use-case that probably doesn’t come up that often in web-based Flex apps, since if the user clicks another control to trigger an update, the item renderer is exited at that point and the edit committed prior to the dataprovider changing.

In an AIR app, we have native menus available to us. When the user employs native menu selection, the item editor remains active. If that menu option triggers a repolpulation of the data provider (use-case example File>Open), we then get the error.

The workaround is pretty simple. A call needs to be made to destroyItemEditor() on the DataGrid instance before repopulating it’s data. In a simple application this is no great problem. But if you’ve gone to the effort of using something like the PureMVC framework to separate Data Object from View Components, the data object isn’t supposed to have any knowledge of the view. So in my case thefix is quite crude – when issuing the open command, a notification to destory item editors will be issued so any view component that uses them may destroy their editor prior to the repopulation.

My contention is that it should be the responsibilty of the DataGrid to destroy the item editor if the dataprovider updates.

I have this logged as a bug with Adobe (SDK-15280), along with sample code demonstrating the issue. Feel free to review and vote for the bug if you are in agreement with my point and comment further therein if you disagree or have better suggestions to offer.

Posted by creacog in AIR, Bug, Flex 3, Flex Builder, 0 comments
31
Mar
2008

E4X delete… not so obvious… but easy

I’ve just been trying to delete a node and all its descendants from an XML object selected on the value of an attribute. Having read the “ECMAScript for XML (E4X) Specification” (PDF) as linked to from the Flex documentation I expected to be able to write the following…

delete theXMLObject..*.(@id=="theIDtoDelete");

however the above code will generate the following Flash Player runtime error…

TypeError: Error #1119: Delete operator is not supported with operand of type XMLList

The solution is simple if not obvious. The above code should be rewritten to ensure a single node is returned rather than a list…

delete theXMLObject..*.(@id=="theIDtoDelete")[0];

Distilled from this actionscript.org thread.

Posted by creacog in ActionScript, Flash Platform, Flex, 9 comments
20
Mar
2008

finding documentation on implementing native menus in Flex/AIR applications

When you come to build your first Flex/AIR application that needs a native menu (Application menu on a Mac, or Window menu on a Windows PC), you’ll probably find your way to the “Windows, menus, and taskbars” section within the documentation. From there you’ll navigate to “Working with native menus” and spend some time studying “Creating native menus” before going on to view the example code. At this point you’ll probably have a shock at how much AS3 code needs to be written to implement such a simple menu. Not at all what you are used to in Flex.

If you are thinking there must be a way to do this using a component. You’d be right, but it is documented in the “Using the Flex AIR components” “About the FlexNativeMenu control“section not the “Windows, menus and taskbars” section.

Posted by creacog in AIR, Flex, Flex 3, 0 comments
11
Mar
2008

what happened to my tweets?

The dark bit of sky in this blog’s header contains a simple SWF generated from pure AS3 that uses the Twitter API to collect and display my history of twitter messages. Unfortunately there is now a cross-domain policy file preventing any SWF other than those hosted actually from the twitter.com domain from accessing the feed. Apparently due to a security issue. The current suggested work-around is for me to write a proxy php script to sit on my own server to relay the feed request. Which I might do if I can be arsed, but I’m feeling grumpy today so I’m more likely to abandon Twitter all together – not that I ever over used it.

Twitter development talk on google groups has a thread that reveals some of the thinking going into solving the issue.

Posted by creacog in Flash Platform, Flex, twitter, 0 comments
26
Feb
2008

thanks again for more poker

Thanks to Sean for organising a second poker tournament and thanks to Adobe for sponsoring it once more. Last time I was a loser. Last night however I did a tad better. Still feeling a quite pleased with myself and slightly guilty for beating some far more seasoned players to get to the final table, then to be knocked out of the last six by the guy who went on to win the whole thing.

winner

Posted by creacog in Adobe, 1 comment
25
Feb
2008

DragManager workaround in final Flex3/AIR1

With today’s availability of release versions of Flex 3 and AIR 1, I’ve finally had a chance to apply the DragManager workaround that I had a moan about last month.

The flex documentation presents three configuration options for DragManager in AIR projects…

[Extract]

  1. Your main application file uses the <mx:Application> tag. In this scenario, you use the Flex drag-and-drop manager, and cannot drag and drop items from outside of AIR.
  2. Your main application file uses the <mx:WindowedApplication> tag. In this scenario, you use the AIR drag-and-drop manager, and can drag and drop items from outside of AIR.
  3. Your main application file uses the <mx:Application> tag, but loads the AIR drag-and-drop manager as represented by the mx.managers.NativeDragManagerImpl class. In this scenario, you use the AIR drag-and-drop manager, and can drag and drop items from outside of AIR.

Sounds all well and good. Except to use <mx:Application> within AIR, you lose functionality. For instance in my case while the window was re-sizeable, the content remained at the default size. What I really need is to use <mx:WindowedApplication>, but with the Flex DragDrop manager. A scenario not represented in the documentation.

Fortunately the workaround with files described in bug SDK-13983 so-far appears to work. However it is worth noting that in using it, a number of mxml tags change their namespace from mx to comps. In my case this affects

  • <mx:states>
  • <mx:transitions>

which then become

  • <comps:states>
  • <comps:transitions>

Possibly my reliance on this approach is due to the now legacy nature of the project – it was written in advance of the Apollo 1 alpha. However apart from this issue, very little has had to be re-written through the beta cycle of AIR.

Posted by creacog in ActionScript, Adobe, AIR, Flex, Flex 3, Flex Builder, 2 comments
21
Feb
2008

A flurry of events : Adobe/Flash/Flex

A busy few weeks starting tonight:

  1. [Thurs 21-Feb-2008] LFPUG – Thermo Special presentation from Adobe
  2. [Mon 25-Feb-2008] Adobe sponsored Pokercoder Tournament II  – you need to be a professional user of Adobe products to join in
  3. [Thurs 28-Feb-2008] LFPUG – presentations on ‘Successful Flash Games’ and ‘Practical Particle Effects with Flint’
  4. [Wed 5th March] FLUG – Beer, presentations and chat about Flex
Posted by creacog in ActionScript, Adobe, AIR, CS3, DreamWeaver, Fireworks, Flash Platform, Flex, Flex 2, Flex 3, Flex Builder, 0 comments

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