While reviewing the tutorials and example Flex projects, they seem to focus mainly on form elements and data grids, rather than delivering content in a more visual way. Which is what I will need for this upcoming project. As a result, I have a gap in my comfort level that I'm hoping that a seasoned Flex developer can help me hurtle.
The project that I have is a collaboration index tool to display customers products and services using an user interface with four separate panels.
the top-left panel will contain a list of categories in a vertical scroll.
The bottom left panel will contain a wheel effect of sub-categories, based on the category chosen.
The top right panel will contain the detail information - The selected Category Title and Description. And below that, the selected sub-category title and description.
The bottom right panel will contain a list of the service and product items that belong to the sub-category. Below each item in the list will be a link-group accordion with url links for more information in each.
There will be an XML file containing the complete data tree driving this collaboration index.
Additionally, depending on the category chosen, color variances will occur in the background of the some of layout sections.
So, It appears that I will need to create a few custom components, maybe adopt a few existing components, and re-skin everything so that it carries a synonymous look and feel to the client's branding.
Although I have a bunch of questions, tackling the first section seems logical, and the first question that comes to mind in this section is: in the top left panel, should the list of categories be standard Flex buttons that are re-skinned? or should they be object instances somehow brought in to Flex.
Then in the second section, I was had seen a component that displayed images in a way that was perfect for this section. But, the items show here would be just visual, rounded corner blocks with subcategory names in them. So, I'm not sure if that component will work or not.
AS3 is very different from AS2. I'm sure you've noticed by now, but it's worth mentioning in case you hadn't.
Flex Components are basically just a package of Flash objects. So you can, sort of, write every Flex component on your own using just Sprites and/or TextFields. This includes skins. A skin is pretty much just a Shape attached to an object with custom drawing.
A button is just a combination of image+textField+skin, with all the events and skin transitions managed for you.
The reason I mention this is that there is no right way to do what you want. If you're using the List control, you should probably write a component that implements IListItemRenderer. Button does, so you can simply override the Button, no problems. You can have buttons with a label + icon. Or just icon. Or just a label. You can also define where the label is positioned relative to the icon (labelPosition="above|below|left|right"). There is a lot of built-in flexibility.
Thanks for the mention of FlexSpaces. Note that it was finally ported to Flex 4 including a first pass conversion to spark controls earlier this year. Still to do: add dependency injection with Spring ActionScript, remove use of Cairngorm 2.x.
I have been developing Flex 4 quite heavily the past 6 months and must say it would make your job very easy.
Here's what I would do:
1) Check out FlexSpaces for the best Flex 3 project architecture. It's a fully featured CMS in Flex with categories, tags, searching, filesystem, collaboration, etc.
2) Download the Flex 4 SDK and install that. There's no need to use Flex 3 anymore, if you're just getting started, DEFINITELY go with Flex 4. If you need custom components, Spark (the new component architecture) has a very simple way of doing them (here's a cool blog post building a Rating Component in Spark that shows you how do it). Flex 4 is backward compatible with Flex 3 components, so you can use projects/components you find on the internet if you want to, no problem.
3) For the top-left category list, if the categories aren't nested, I would use the spark.components.List, (here's one using more complex item renderers). Then just extend the spark.components.supportClasses.ItemRenderer, which acts just like a Skin. If categories are nested, just use the mx.controls.Tree. Check out that FlexSpaces project for that (they show how to use XML/ArrayCollections in the tree, your "object instances brought into flex somehow" question).
4) For the wheel effect, the only thing I don't like about Spark so far is that it's difficult to animate layouts. But people are starting to make 3D layouts, check out Here's 5 3D Layouts for Flex 4 by Ryan Campbell. There's also OpenFlux if you want very easily animated layouts. Flex effects in general are quite clunky, so I end up just using Tweener or TweenMax for animations.
5) As for reskinning, trying to reskin using the Flex 3 architecture would be a monumental task, if you wanted to make it look clean and nice, and it would be insane trying to reuse that code in the next project. For Spark, it's a snap, and it's 100% mxml. Just copy the whole sparkSkins folder from the SDK and start changing things, and you're good to go.
But yeah, that FlexSpaces project is a very solid example for what you're talking about. Totally open source.
Cheers
Related
I am using ASP.NET (MVC 4 internet application template). I have the master page and within it I embed another page. This embeded page should have the appearance shown here (Draft): http://snag.gy/OGIut.jpg
This page is three column. First column has a groupbox and into it some radio buttons (options). In the second column there are more groupboxes, as seen in figure above (see link above) and the same for third column. Each groupbox has a title, and before the title a checkbox (this is useful for enable or disable the entire groupbox so user cannot select any options within it). In third column at the end there is a plain button (not 3D), and at the bottom of the page there is a grey section where there is a plain button at the rightmost.
So as I am completely new in web and css programming I am thinking about how to organize all this elements in the view to have the appearance indicated in the picture.
Could anyone help and tell me how to do this? any example? I am very frustrated when working with html and css because I find difficult to place the elements in the correct place.
Maybe you should consider to use frameworks to help to place the element on a grid. The most famous one is of course Bootstrap but there is plenty of these http://usablica.github.io/front-end-frameworks/compare.html. It makes the web development really faster and easier.
Plus, these kind of frameworks comes with JS & CSS library which can be really helpfull to create modern webpage with sliders, smooth scroling, models windiws etc..
Is there a way to display so called badges in Flex elements?
With badges I mean the little red circles with a number in it which are used to display the amount of new items in a inbox by example.
I want to display badges in a flex list or tabbed item.
Is this core functionality of Flex?
You can definitely do this in Flex, but it will likely (without seeing your designs, etc) require implementing a custom item renderer for the list. For an example of doing this for a Flex-based web or AIR app, look here. Also, you will likely want to read up on Flex 4 skinning for writing a custom skin for your list item renderers, as well as perhaps the list itself. Additionally, if you are, as implied by your tags, writing a flex mobile app, you'll want to read up on building mobile item renderers as they differ in subtle, but important ways from standard web-based Flex or desktop AIR apps. The short answer, then, is yes, but you will likely need to write some custom code to get things exactly the way you want them, styling-wise and behaviorally.
How did you do? I use the next snippet for a badge in a tabbed item. http://blog.aboutme.be/2011/10/28/flex-mobile-tabbed-view-navigator-button-badge/
I hope it helps you.
I am having difficulty navigating to different MXML pages in my Flex application. I checked some other questions on SO about it but they seemed to be to do with tab navigation.
I am trying to navigate from one MXML page to another via Actionscript code. How is this possible?
Cheers
Edit:
I am a real beginner in Flex and I worked out that I actually needed to use States, and have now discovered how to use them. Thanks for your help.
You don't navigate between MXML pages. MXMLs are not pages to begin with. Instead they are components, that are displayed in the application. So if you want to change the current display, then you need to remove the already added components, and add others that should be displayed now.
There are different approaches to do this. The very raw way of manually removing elements is rarely used, instead there are two main methods: ViewStacks and display states. Display states should be used when there are not many different changes in a view, for example when you click a checkbox that adds new options to an existing formular. If you want to change the whole displayed content (this does not have to be the whole application content though, think in components instead), you can use ViewStacks.
ViewStacks are like a stack of paper, where each paper reflects a single view. So if you want to display something else, you move the new view to the top, hiding all others below. Many components, including TabNavigators, are just ViewStacks with an additional menu to select the view that should be displayed. But you can also just use a ViewStack and manually change to what you want to show.
Flex is not sidebased like html.
You have to instantiate or remove classes, components or all this stuff.
i would use the states.
You can register handler to buttons and swap the state.
Then you are able to instatiate or remove components via the tsates.
Which flex version dou you use? The management of the states are changing between flex3 and flex4
Assume, you have one app with two content areas, home and gallery. First you have to create these two areas with project->new->component and named there related.
After that, you instanciate both components in your app.
Define two states, home and gallery and swap these with a button or two.
set the propert excludefrom or include with the name of the states. finally, you have an app with two content areas, but you never swap pages, you instanciate or remove components in runtime.
br
Frank
BR
Frank
I want to create a news application for my website.
My question is how should i create drag-able panels/canvas inside another panel/canvas.
What i exactly intend to do can be seen on netvibes.com . The website has different panels of every news group, and this panel could be moved from one place to other, but in a well defined manner. And the other panel take over the place of dragged panel.
Is there any component in flex, which can help me make something like that.
If i was unable to make my question clear, plz let me know, i will try to make it more clear.
Regards
Zeeshan
A TileList with drag and drop enabled should be able to accomplish something like that. Or, use a Spark List with a custom layout that you create.
It might be a bit tricky getting the list elements to drag and drop based on clicking the title, but it should be doable.
I think you should consider a more advanced solution with drap-n-drop with a custom panel based component. The places the panels can move can be implemented with a different custom canvas based component. The advantage would be to move the components into different custom positions and panels can be resized independent of each other.
Adobe has some good tutorials for drag-drop operations.
I'm currently building an application that is presenting tabular (fetched from a webservice) data and have squirted it into a datagrid - seemed the most obvious way to present it on screen.
I've now come across a few limitations in the datagrid and wonder how I might move forward. As a relative newcomer to flex development I'm a little lost.
A few things I am wanting to do.
The data is logically split into groups and I would like to be able to have subheadings in the grid whenever I move to a new group.
I would like to be able to highligh individual cells based on their content relative to other values in the row - ie highlight the cell with the highest value in the row.
Is this possible with the standard datagrid?
I'm actually using the try-before-you-buy version of flex builder at the moment but I have ordered Flex Builder 3 Pro - which is on its way to me. I understand there is an 'advanced datagrid' control in this version - perhaps that will support some of what I wish to do?
Alternatively - is there another way of building custom tabular data?
stay the hell away from Adobe's AdvancedDataGrid. You will learn quickly it has many shortcomings, you will think you are better than it and override a few things here, tweak a few things there, but in the end the ADG will absolutely destroy you. Heed my call and avoid this at all costs. The ADG was outsourced by Adobe to their failed Indian team that has sense been disbanded, it alone counts for over %30 of the entire flex framework, and their are horrible deeply rooted issues that are better off starting over at this point. STAY AWAY FROM THE ADVANCDEDDATAGRID AT ALL COSTS!!!!!
The DataGrid is the best bet for that, but also check out the AdvancedDataGrid (here are some AdvancedDataGrid Demos with Source from FarataSystems).
(source: flexicious.com)
Both the DataGrid and AdvancedDataGrid are notoriously hard to customize, and everything you'd like to do is pretty advanced, so it will take a while to get going, but you can do it eventually.
There's no other way to build tabular data unless you start doing some advanced things with some of the data visualization libraries out there.
Good luck,
Lance