Flash® Builder™ 4 and Flex® 4 Bible

Chapter 22. Working with Data Entry Forms

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using the Form container

• Creating a Form component

• Laying out Form controls with the FormItem container

• Validating data entry

• Sharing data with value objects and custom events

When you start to integrate data into a Flex application, you have to solve the problem of how to get data into the Flex runtime environment. As you have seen in earlier chapters, you can embed data into the application using hard-coded MXML or ActionScript, or by integrating data into the application with the <fx:Model> tag. These strategies, however, only work for data that's both small and static.

For existing data that's retrieved from a server-based resource, such as a database or an EXtensible Markup Language (XML) file, you can use Remote Procedure Call (RPC) components such as HTTPService, WebService, and RemoteObject.

Note

For more information about HTTPService, WebService, and RemoteObject RPC components, see Chapters 23, 25, 26, 28, and 29.

And then there's data that comes from the user. Unless an application is used exclusively with static data or content retrieved from a server at runtime, a data-centric application must collect data from the user. In this chapter, I describe using the following tools for building data entry form components:

• The Form, FormHeading, and FormItem components for laying out a data entry form

• Validator components to validate a user's data entry

• Custom value object and event classes to share data with the rest of the application ...