Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Category: Flex

  • Miscellaneous Debris: Flex Todo Lists

    In an attempt to get a t-shirt, I took an 8 day, off-hour stab at Sho’s challenge. I wanted to affirm via example that I feel the Controller is important, as well as just how much goes into it to ensure your bigger applications, even something as “small” as a Todo List application, can be scalable and easily maintained.

    After battling a 2 day “ID is a reserved word, but the compiler doesn’t tell you, thus your binding gets jacked”, and various other challenges, I got bored, and gave up. I figure I can sweet talk one of the MM peeps to hook me up with a shirt at some various conferences.

    Anyway, code’s here for your perusal. Uses Flex on the front-end, utilizing ARP with my modifications, and AMFPHP on the backend talking to MySQL. Hope it helps you learn something new!

    Todo Lists – ZIP

  • Flex: Star Wars Galaxies Resource Viewer v3

    Built v3 of my SWG Resource Viewer in Flex (1st @ 2nd Central, 3rd Flex). It’s basically an application that shows you a list of recent resources, data being served from community driven swgcraft.com, that crafters in the Star Wars Galaxies MMORPG can utilize to filter the results and see what resources are available. Since resource quality, types, and locations change weekly, and some qualties/types don’t resurface for months at a time, crafters from Amorsmiths, Weaponsmiths, and even Chefs like to know what’s what, and where since some things in game can’t be made without certain ingredients.

    As such, I tried my best to implement 2 filtering mechnisms in the huge amount of data; quality range & profession type. Quality range is adjusted by averaging the current numbers displayed in the columns currently visible, and showing only what matches the range set on the dual-thumbed slider. The 2nd is using an XML file to only show resources a certain profession cares about. Currently only weaponsmith is implemented because her majesty has a weaponsmith for 1 of her characters, and thus asked me to implement it. I’ve already been asked for a plethora of minor feature requests mainly relating to usability (saving colums, saving DataGrid widths, filtering via other professions, etc.). Not that I don’t already have enough open source software projects to work on (CaptivatePlayer, AMFPHP examples, personally modded-ARP) in my free time.

    Anyway, app’s there with source. I used some of ARP in Flex (made my own Controller class instead of mapping commands directly). Commands rock! Also, since I ripped the SWF out and lost all JavaScript, I had to use PHP to automatically write FlashVars tags based on what you set in the URL for get vars (was using PHP anyway to get the gzipped XML feeds). Flex by default uses JavaScript to parse out the URL, and setup _root/mx.core.Application.application scoped vars that you can utilize to init your application.

    SWG Resource Viewer v3

  • No Complete Event for Internal Content

    Both Flash & Flex have a Loader component to load content into. It’s nice in Flash because it abstracts sizing & loading code. It’s even cooler in Flex because you can bind to contentPath.

    However, if the content you are loading in Flash is an internal symbol, or embedded content in Flex (same thing), you will not get a “complete” event.

    I find this wrong since expectations are, “I load content, I get an event while it’s loading, ‘progress’, and I get an event when it is completed, ‘completed’.” However, you only get these events for external content, like external JPEG’s & SWF’s. The documentation for both Flash & Flex versions does not state anything to the contrary.

    Frankly, since this component abstracts the loading process, it should be up to the component omit events regardless of loaded content, or emit different events. This now requires the user of the component to know which content type they are loading.

    This is an important distinction, because such low level details of whether something is an internal asset are not easily determined at runtime in both Flash & Flex. The more OOP something is, the less you know about where an asset came from. Simply adding the “Embed” metatag in Flex above an asset path, and it’s internal; your code doesn’t change.

    Additionally, Flex abstracts control via binding. Since this connection is handled for you, one assumes (wrongly) that those bindings work without data inspection intervention.

    What I’ve been doing is just checking if the asset I’m loading has a prefix of “__Resources” in it; if so, it’s an internal asset in Flex, and thus I must immediately call my complete event myself. Hack.

  • Flex Chronicles #12: External Text Files for String Variables

    Typically, if you want external content in Flash, you link to an external text file, and load it into a text field like so:

    lv = new LoadVars();
lv.owner = this;
lv.onData = function(str)
{
  this.owner.my_txt.text = str;
};
lv.load("yourTextFile.txt");

    Quick and dirty, right? Well, Flex does the same thing for you, but without all the work; check this out:

    <mx:String id="data_str" source="some.txt" />
    <mx:TextArea text="{data_str}" />

    Yes, that’s it, I swear! The line between authortime & compile time is blurred so technically this is compiled in, but it remains an external text file you can check into source control & deploy on your webserver, or keep locally.