Extending DateChooser.selectableRange to accept multiple values/ranges
Recently I came across the following requirement: Enable few disjoint dates in a DateChooser for user selection. The default DateChooser.selectableRange does not allow inserting of list of dates. It takes only a range and disables the rest.
I copied and modified the Flex 2 DateChooser control to achive the new functionlity. The swc is available here http://sreenivas.ramaswamy.googlepages.com/FlexEx2.swc.
I used this file to do the testing. I have done basic testing and it seems to work.
Only few dates in Jan, Feb and March of 2008 are enabled and it restircts the navigation to only those months
Currently I have made changes to only Flex 2 DateChooser. I would be happy to fix any bugs found !
Here are the Flex 3 files: DateChooser and CalenderLayout.
9:31 AM | Labels: Flex Samples, Flex with Data Services | 0 Comments
GroupingCollection to group mails on Date and Subject
Here is a sample I wrote using GC to group mails according to Date and Subject very similar to Outlook. This sample serves to show the complex ways in which GC can be configures and used.
Subject grouping: The sample uses GroupingField.groupingFunction and GroupingField.compareFunction to achive the Subject grouping even when subject line text is prefixed with RE:, FW: etc. Grouping.groupingObjectFunction is used to supply a custom grouping object MailGroup which has a date field getter function to return the maximum date of the child mail items.
Date grouping: Again groupingFunction is used to form diffrent groups of mails based on the date value.
The "show unread mails" option can be used to remove the read mails from the view. This shows filtering applied to the HierarchicalCollectionView which ADG creates internally when a GroupingCollection (or anything which implements IHierarchicalData) is supplied as the dataProvider.
The "highlight unread mails" option uses the ADG.styleFunction property to hightlight the unread mails by making them bold.
The source is available here
Please note I have a tweak in the sample to keep it ever-green, that is the date values of the mail items are generated at runtime than hard coded.
9:25 AM | Labels: Flex with Data Services | 0 Comments
Flex Data Services - CRM Sample using Hibernate
I've played around a great deal with the sample applications that shipped with Flex Data Services. In particular I was intrigued in getting the CRM example to work with Hibernate. I'm not going to get too deep into the particulars. Here's just a good overview of what needed to be done or what purpose was served, by file.
samples\web-inf\web.xml
In this file there's a section of code that needs to be uncommented. This enables a servlet that runs when jrun boots up, which creates a file called hibernate.cfg.xml and puts it in the samples\web-inf\classes\samples folder.
samples\web-inf\classes\samples\hibernate.cfg.xml
Once you uncomment the web.xml and start up FDS once, this file should exist. In here you will see some basic configuration stuff that basically creates a jdbc connection to an hsqldb database (a java sql engine that runs within the context of the app server). Also you will not two mapping files, explained next.
samples\web-inf\classes\samples\crm\employee.hbm.xml
samples\web-inf\classes\samples\crm\company.hbm.xml
These two files serve to map sql tables & columns to java classes and properties, found in samples.crm.Employee and samples.crm.Company, respectively. You can find the source code for these files (if you're new to the java world like me) in samples\web-inf\src\(...)
samples\web-inf\flex\data-management-config.xml
In this file there are 2 sections that need to be uncommented out. You can leave the other destinations in place and just uncomment the destinations crm.employee.hibernate and crm.company.hibernate. Once you've saved these changes it's a good idea to restart FDS.
samples\dataservice\crm\companyapp.mxml
First go ahead and launch this in a browser, make sure FDS is running. The default address would be http://localhost:8700/samples/dataservice/crm/companyapp.mxml and make sure everything is still working fine. At this point the application is still using the custom company and employee assembler classes, not hibernate. If everything works fine, go ahead and edit the file. You'll need to find all the comments that pertain to Hibernate and then comment out the line preceding it, while uncommenting the line the line that follows, as per the comment instructions. Save your changes.
Now go ahead and reload the companyapp.mxml page in the browser. Keep the FDS console open and if everything went well, you can watch as hibernate generates and logs query statements.
10:40 AM | Labels: Flex Samples, Flex with Data Services | 0 Comments