Introduction This is part 4 in my series on using Flex, BlazeDS, and Java. In this part I explain how I used Java to provide my Flex application with a collection of objects that were populated by records from a database. BlazeDS provides the plumbing that enables Flex to communicate with the Java classes on the back end. If you've not yet read the previous posts in this series, you should review them first. Steps to Set Up This Example You can view this example online.

Introduction This is part 3 of my series on how to use BlazeDS to enable Flex to communicate with Java on the backend. If you've not yet read parts 1 and 2, you should review them before continuing. In this blog entry I'll explain how I created an example to have Java send a user-defined data type (a data transfer object) and a collection of user-defined data types to the Flex application.

Introduction This blog entry continues my exploration of how to use Flex, Java, and BlazeDS together. In this tutorial I explain how to send data from Flex to a Java class.

Introduction When you want to directly use Java classes to provide data to a Flex application you need to add some additional plumbing that enables Flex to "talk with" the Java classes. Flex comes ready to rock with ColdFusion Components, but doesn't have everything it needs to communicate directly with Java classes exposed by a J2EE or servlet container such as Tomcat.

Introduction There may be occasions when a CFC function being used by Flex needs to throw a custom exception to alert the caller of the function that some problem has occurred during the function (1). If you're using Flex to call a CFC function that may throw an exception then you need a way to handle the exception in Flex (6) and display an appropriate error message to the user.

Introduction I recently needed to add a print capability to a Flex application to allow the user to print the results being displayed in a DataGrid control. The print out would need to span multiple pages since the number of rows displayed in the DataGrid exceeds the height of one printed page. Not having had to print a DataGrid's content before I consulted the Flex 3 documentation.

Introduction ColdFusion makes it easy to display query results grouped by one of the query result columns on a web page. You just need to use the group attribute (1) of the cfoutput tag. Showing grouped data that was provided by a ColdFusion query in Flex 2 was not so easy. However, with the introduction of the AdvancedDataGrid component (2) in Flex 3, it's now simple to showed grouped data that initially came from a ColdFusion query.

I was recently working on a Flex project where I wanted to use the LinkBar component (1). However, the data I needed to use that included the label values for the LinkBar's LinkButtons was in an XML file. As best I can tell, the LinkBar component is one of the few Flex components whose dataProvider attribute doesn't accept XMLList or XMLListCollection. According to reference 2, the dataProvider value for a LinkBar component must either be a ViewStack component or an array.

The Yahoo! maps AS3 API provides a SearchMarker class that is used to display on the map an icon representing a LocalSearchItem class object. The LocalSearchItem class is used to store data contained in a result returned from searching the Yahoo! Local listings (see the related entry below). This data includes phone, address, website, title, etc. However, you can create your own LocalSearchItem objects and use these objects to create SearchMarker objects and display those on the map.