Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

RecordSet Object

The one class that truly separates Flash Remoting from other techniques for dealing with remote data in Flash is the RecordSet class. The RecordSet.as file is installed as part of the Flash Remoting authoring components, which makes available the RecordSet class. We introduced the RecordSet class in the Chapter 3, but let’s examine it further and describe some of its available methods. For more information, refer to Chapter 15, which documents the RecordSet class, among others. For brevity in the following sections, I use the term “recordset” interchangeably with “client-side RecordSet object” where the equivalence is clear from context.

Anyone who works with databases every day, like I do, will tell you that the recordset is king. Everything you can do with data—from displaying lists of products to summarizing account information, analyzing web traffic, totaling a shopping cart, or viewing threads in a forum—ultimately depends on recordsets. A recordset is simply a way of organizing data, usually into rows and columns. The Flash RecordSet class offers a way to pass this organized data from the server to the client and manipulate it on the client with simple, intuitive methods. The following sections explain the methods of the RecordSet class. The lines of code can be typed in consecutively to follow along with the results that are obtained.

When working with RecordSet objects, it is handy to be able to examine the contents of the object. For that reason, I’ve ...