Right now, I am just going to talk about the sizing of the children inside the s:Scroller component. It’s something that I have run into a few times, and writing it out here will cement things in my head and hopefully be helpful to you, the reader.

When sizing children inside a scroller, make sure you aren’t using percent based sizing. Why? Because then the child will attempt to size itself to the size of the scroller. It seems obvious, but it’s one of those things that you don’t think about in the middle of coding since it isn’t something that you would think about in Flex 3.

When you use percentage based layout for the children, you end up getting children with their display elements cut off. The scroller thinks that the child is sized correctly based off of it’s percentage, and not it’s actual size. The way around this is to use constraint based layout. If you want a width=”100%” layout, then simply switching to left=0 right=0 will fix your problems. Also, if you don’t need to be fussy with your layout, then let the component size itself, and scroller will handle that properly as well.

In conclusion, avoid percentage based layouts when laying out inside a scroller component.

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The project I have been working on lately has thrown me headlong into CF, and I find that I like it. It’s been quite easy to pick up, and the changes from CF 8 to CF9 are interesting. Which is part of the class this Thursday. Also part of that class is Flex’s integration with CF9.

To sign up for the free class, head over to the registration site: http://www.ce1.com/adobe/2009/flextrainingforcfdevelopers/

I have no idea if it is full or not, but I know we had over 70 people signed up when I talked with Jeff about it last week. Should be a fun day!

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First:

FlexUnit 4 has NOTHING to do with Flash Builder 4 in terms of version number. It actually relates to JUnit 4 (which specific version, I don’t know, someone?). So for those of you wondering, yes, it can test Flex 3 SDK , not just Flex 4 SDK projects.

Next: Getting started

Whether you have an already created project, or are starting a brand new one, there is a simple set of steps that you can perform in Flex Builder 4 to set up your project for unit testing.

I am writing this, because I thought it should be easy, and it is, I just went about it the wrong way and I want you out there to not have to make the same mistake.

Originally, I was right clicking on the Package Explorer and trying to use Execute FlexUnit Tests menu item. While this will eventually work, it won’t yet. Why? You haven’t set up your project to know that it has FlexUnit tests!

Steps: (This is the way I know how to do it, if you know another way, let me know!)

1. Select Run > Run > FlexUnit Tests
   1. This brings up a progress dialog that sets up all of the libraries into your project.
   2. Then the Run FlexUnit Tests dialog comes up.
   3. If you haven’t written any tests yet, then you can only Cancel from this.
2. Write some tests!
   1. Create a new package that will contain all of your tests. This way you can keep track of them more easily and separate them out of your production code.
   2. A simple testing class will look like this:
   ^?Download download.txt

   package TestingPackage { import flexunit.framework.Assert;   public class TestSampleLayout { [Test] public function testAssertFalse():void { Assert.assertFalse( false ); }   [Test] public function testSampleLayoutFunctionReturn():void { var initialString : String = "Hello World."; var finalString : String; finalString = new SampleLayout().sampleFunctionReturnTest( initialString ); Assert.assertEquals( initialString, finalString ); }   public function TestSampleLayout() { } } }

   3. This class does two tests.
      1. It asserts that False really is false. You normally wouldn’t do this, but it shows you something of what you can do.
      2. It tests the method “sampleFunctionReturnTest” of the class SampleLayout. The method merely spits back whatever string it was entered.
   4. So when it gets run through AssertEquals, and they are equal, then the test passes. If they are not, then it would fail.
3. Note that before each test method is [Test], this is what FlexUnit 4 uses to determine if a method is a test or not. So you need that before every test you want run.

I am still working out all of the different types of testing that are available, but this should hopefully get you started until I post more, or more documentation becomes available.

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As with the other sessions, this one was well presented and informative. I learned from it and I hope you will as well.

Enjoy!

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I’m still working at Digital Primates and loving what I do there. I haven’t had much time while on the job to study up for the Flex Developer’s Certification, so I do that as much as I can from home. I need to take a practice test or two to see where I would score if I took the actual test, and where I need to focus my studies to make sure I pass.

Over the last several months I have worked more with the Flex Framework than I have ever before. I am so used to doing things in pure AS2 an AS3, that I had to retrain myself to look for things in the framework that were already waiting for me to just use them. Some of the people at DP also have been a great help in this. I’d thank them all here, but I’d really be thanking everyone at the company, so thanks guys.

Moving on into the late summer, I am still working on my augmented reality project. My friend and now co-worker (he’s an intern at Digital Primates), Joe, is helping me work through the FLARToolkit. Making things make sense, and finding out where we can speed things up. Optimization was the main topic last week. This week it was me solo, but I was able to get DAZ3D models into our app. Definitely need more optimizing there (15 Meg for a model! jeesh!).

Oh, and I am also now a contributor to the FLARToolkit’s repo. Haven’t submitted anything yet, but I should before the next post. So with Podiobooks.com, this is the second open source project that I am currently active in.

I may get out another post before Gen Con, so stay tuned.

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By Michael James McFarland

Read by David Moore

I won’t go into the details surrounding my dismissal from a well-known East Coast brokerage firm. other than to say I inadvertently let slip some information of a rather sensitive nature and, when it came down to drawing the line, the firm was more interested in maintaining their reputation than my livelihood.

Of course they were. But I didn’t exactly walk away empty-handed. They were all very civilized. There were no black marks on my resume; hell, they even found me another job. At a much smaller firm in Seattle.

And that’s where I met Mira, who this tale is really about.

Links mentioned: Closing music by Hopeful Machines, a side project of Ego Likeness Promo for Crescent, by Phil Rossi, rushing Amazon charts on July 9, 2009

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This third episode is from the session by Kevin Schmidt, and he gave a talk about uploading files in Flex. I’d say more, but really, his title says it all. It was an informative and detailed demonstration, and I recommend you take a listen.

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If you haven’t seen or heard about augmented reality or the FLARToolkit, I suggest you head over to his site and take a look, or Google about it. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

So about three weeks ago I started looking into this technology and it just grabbed me. It grabbed me so hard and was shoving thoughts into my brain that I had to do something about it, thus, the summer project.

I roped another developer, Joe Adkins, into working with me, and together we are digging into the toolkit, looking at other libraries that people are creating, and in general right now getting our hands dirty with code. Right now I have code under my fingernails, code in my hair, and I dream about the toolkit at night.

You might be wondering what it is that I am actually doing with my summer project. Well, I am not going to tell you, yet. It’s still too early. Though as the name implies, I expect to have the first version done by the end of summer.

Stay tuned though, since I intend on posting some work in project shots, and maybe even a few working demos.

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The sessions were nearly all good, I gained both knowledge and varying ways of presenting from them. I did record most of the sessions that I participated in, but since I am behind on getting Flex Camp Chicago recordings to you, and I didn’t get permission to post recordings, they won’t show up here. Don’t despair though, the Flex Show recorded all of the sessions and will be releasing them. When they do I will notify you here.

A note for all future presenters, if you use an internet connection for your presentation make sure you have a backup plan or can talk past it. I saw at least two presentations where the connection was too slow to be useful. One handled it smoothly, the other was derailed and was less engaging because of it.

I participated in the Charity Code Jam for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). It was an app that would track runners in a marathon via RFID and display the runners on the map. It also allowed coaches to look up and change runner information, volunteers to check in runners, and had an interactive mode for spectators to look up individual runners. It was an amazing time, and I met a lot of great developers of all skill levels. We got the app to about 70% for the Wednesday keynote speech, and since I had been up for more than 24 hours straight at that point I ended my participation there. The code is open source, and will be released for further development and use in other marathons. So when I find out where the project is going to be hosted, I will post that here too.

The people I met at the Charity Code Jam and around the convention are people that I look forward to keeping up with. They are developers of varying stripes. People that do pure Flex, some PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, you name it and I probably could tell you someone who did it. Definitely more on those folks as I gather the business cards, twitter handles, and email addresses for them.

As I keep saying, more to come in later posts. 360|Conferences is starting to host more conferences, so if you aren’t a Flex developer they probably will have a development conference for you at some point. Right now they have an iPhone developer conference, an RIA and mobile conferences are scheduled. The blog site for 360|Conferences is very basic right now, but don’t let that put you off. This conference was excellent and if I have the time I will be going to more.

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This article is for Flex 3, since Flex 4 will be changing this lifecycle in a fairly significant manner. When I know more about that, I will post a new set of articles relating to Flex 4 and it’s way of doing things. If you can’t wait for me to finish the rest of the articles, you can read more on the Adobe documentation on advanced component development.

—–

All Flex components, from UIComponent on up, implement several key methods that enable them to be used by the Flex framework to create themselves and their children, measure themselves, position their children, and a whole host of other things. Most custom UI components will be created by extending existing Flex UI components. Here I will give you the basics for those methods, and some things that you can do with them, and several things your shouldn’t do with them. In later articles I will unpack these concepts to give you more detail and code samples.

There are several key methods in custom UI components that you as a developer should at least be aware of, and will be using in most of your custom component development.

• createChildren
• measure
• updateDisplayList
• commitProperties
• layoutChrome (I haven’t ever used this one, so any feedback on it would be appreciated)

The one common thread with these methods here is they should never be called manually. They are all called automatically by the Flex Framework at specific times, either at component instantiation, or when certain conditions are true. (Such as when size, properties, or display list is marked invalid.) All of these methods are also overridden methods from the Flex UI components you are extending.

There are also several methods that will be called automatically, and also called when certain actions need to be performed. These things signal the component framework to do it’s magic.

• invalidateProperties()
• invalidateSize()
• invalidateDisplayList()

createChildren
createChildren is called shortly after the component is instantiated, and is used to create the initial children of the component, and adding them to the display list. This isn’t to say more children won’t be created later. It is used to create the initial children of the component, and should be used for only that. You should never need to, and never should, call createChildren yourself. It is only called the once by the framework when the component is instantiated, and to count on that functionality, don’t call it yourself.

measure
measure is called by the Flex framework when invalidateSize() is called on the component. If the size of the component is set explicitly, however, then measure will never be called. measure is used to set the component’s preferred minimum size based on the size and layout of it’s children. The properties set by measure include: measuredWidth, measuredHeight, measuredMinWidth, measuredMinHeight, these values are then used by the component’s parent to calculate how big it should be, and then on up the chain. Once all of these are calculated, the cycle starts its way down and starts to set the sizes that components should be. The parent sets the component’s actual size, despite what it’s preferred size may be. There is no guarantee the parent will use those measurements to size the component. Generally, if the component needs to be smaller, the parent will adhere to the measuredMinWidth and measuredMinHeight, but use scrollbars to give it enough space.

updateDisplayList
updateDisplayList is called often. It is called when your component’s child invalidates its size, it is called by your component’s parent when it needs to resize. It is called whenever your parent needs to resize you, and it is called when your children need to resize. It is called automatically, and even more so than createChildren, never, never call it manually. Call invalidateProperties(), invalidateSize(), or invalidateDisplayList() instead. That way the Flex framework will automatically call updateDisplayList, and you won’t run into race conditions by calling it out of order, or start off an unnecessary cascade of intense updating of all the components on the screen. updateDisplayList sizes and positions your component’s children, and that is all. If you need to change any other properties of your children, they should be done in other methods.

I will cover invalidateProperties(), invalidateSize(), and invalidateDisplayList() in a later article. They are called for specific reasons, and do specific things in the framework. For those reasons they deserve their own writeup.

commitProperties
The commitProperties method is called as part of the component life cycle after invalidateProperties(); is invoked. This is where you will assign the values that were changed by your setters being called. Your setter methods will have calls to invalidateProperties() to mark the component as needing to call commitProperties in its next lifecycle pass. Setters may also call invalidateDisplayList() as well, if the property being set will change the size of the component or one of it’s children, or would add a child to the UI component.

layoutChrome
I would talk about this one, but I haven’t ever used it. So check out the Adobe docs on this one.

—–

So that is the basics. Next time I will unpack custom component creation in more detail, and give you code examples for the things I discussed here.

I need to thank several people and sources for teaching me about custom components and the component life cycle before I sign off here.

• Michael Labriola – especially his Facts of (Component) Life presentation that I saw at Flex Camp Chicago 2009
• Adobe’s documentation – it’s a fairly decent starting place, but I would listen to Mike’s presentation first since he breaks it down better.
• Thomas Fowler – for going over my initial posting and suggesting some good edits.
• Jeff Tapper – for finding a huge error in where I placed a paragraph.
• There are more, but I don’t have the links right now. I will post them in later articles.

Edit: In the previous version of this article, I misplaced a paragraph during editing. invalidateProperties(), invalidateSize(), and invalidateDisplayList() can all be called manually. None of them should be overriden. As you can see now, the paragraph should have gone under the other methods (createChildren, measure, updateDisplayList, etc.). Thanks Jeff for that catch.

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I did try and capture the questions this time, so you will hear some differences in the background noise levels as I normalize the audio to get the questions to be audible. They are still hard to hear some times, but most of them should be understandable without killing your ears.

If you have any questions or comments about the podcast recordings, feel free to contact me at http://vandermore.com. If you have questions for the presenters, most of their contact information can be found on the Flex Camp Chicago website, http://flexcampchicago.com.

I hope you enjoy the sessions, now on with the show.

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I recorded all of these from a portable recorder, and the quality is fairly good, but the mics are facing towards the front of the room, so while I was able to capture Michael very well, the last questions from the audience were too soft to capture so I had to cut them.

If you have any questions or comments about the podcast recordings, feel free to contact me at http://vandermore.com. If you have questions for the presenters, most of their contact information can be found on the Flex Camp Chicago website, http://flexcampchicago.com.

I hope you enjoy the sessions.

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…

Before I was hired, I thought I knew a fair amount about Flex, having been working with Flash AS2 for many years, and then moving over to Flex and AS3, it seemed more or less like a change in syntax, plus some nice things with the Flex framework that were definite improvements over the Flash IDE for developers.

I was wrong.

I thought I knew, but there is so much more that I didn’t know that I am humbled by the amount that I know is still there and the huge leap in knowledge that I have gained since working there for the few short weeks that I have been training there. Yep, you heard right, training. It’s been a while since I have worked at a job that cared enough about it’s employees, and it’s reputation enough to train new employees enough so that they can do the job right the first time.

…

I’ve had this blog post mostly written for at least a month now. So I am posting it here so you can get an update on what I have been doing. The rest of the post I will write up later. It will be about the Flex component framework. From what I understand, as soon as Flex 4 comes out later this year, that post may become out of date. I’ll be doing it anyway so I know it better, and there are probably more than a few people who will be using Flex 3 for a while after Flex 4 comes out. It’s just the nature of business to not upgrade right away.

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There was also an all to brief introduction to AMF and it’s capabilities. I would love to be able to use BlazeDS, but I am fairly sure that my current ISP won’t support it. I may have to set up a box at home just to play around with it. It has a lot of capabilities that I would like to use both for The Stone Table (more on that in a later post), and PodioBooks.com.

It’s about 20 minutes until start time here, and today looks to be even better than yesterday. Today is supposed to be the expert session, while yesterday was the beginner session. I consider myself fairly well versed in Flex and ActionScript 3, but I can see that there is a whole lot more that I could dig into, and that excites me to no end.

–

Edit: I forgot to mention, I am also Twittering during the sessions, and recording them. Follow me on Twitter today (vandermore), or search for #flexcampchi.

A podcast of the sessions, hopefully with the demonstrations, should be coming as soon as I can edit things and get the files.

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