Flash® Catalyst™ CS5 Bible

Chapter 12. Working with Design-time Data

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Convert an asset to a data list

• Add design-time data

A high percentage of modern Web applications rely on dynamic, server-generated data. In fact, a Web application is often distinguished from a Web site by the application's ability to access, create, or manipulate data at runtime, whereas a site will most often consist of static data.

The Adobe Flex platform provides code-based solutions for developers to retrieve data from a wide variety of server-side sources via an equally wide variety of server technologies. Whether your application's back end stores its information in a database or flat XML file, and whether you use Adobe ColdFusion, Microsoft ASP.NET, PHP, or Java to access that data, your Flex application can accept the data and work with it.

All of this coding and managing back-end systems, however, is the purview of the Flex developer, and requires significant coding. Flash Catalyst was not designed to replace this portion of the application development workflow.

You will likely have regions of your application that are intended to display information that, in the live project, will be populated by your database. Catalyst provides two key features to assist in this process:

• The data list

• Design-time data

Convert an Asset to a Data List

A data list is a special component type in Catalyst designed to allow you to easily create a block of repetitive information, such as that which would likely come from a database. The data ...