I feel dumb saying this, but I am having a heck of a time finding consistent information about Flex 3 classes. I am just starting in Flex and it isn't TOO hard to find an example out there that is close to what you are doing, but often times examples don't cover all the bases, and I'll need to look up a method to get its exact signature. (How many arguments, what type, etc) Generally, I'll turn to the livedocs for this, but I have been wasting a lot of time Googling and I don't think it should be this hard.

If you have been programming in Flex for a while, I have nothing earth-shattering to say here. Nevertheless, having just figured it out I wish to write it down as much for my sake as anyone else. My latest task, simple as it was, involved formatting the numbers in several of my Data Grids as dollars and cents.

I have been enjoying my dip into Flex so far. Sometimes you don't notice habits until you have to change them. One rut I've gotten into over the years is the procedural way web-based apps have gotten be thinking about programming.

Sorry I've been quiet for the past few days. My Flex adventures took a quick detour through the massive land of our AS400 and DB2. Now that I had a prototype of my pretty line, bar, and pie charts I needed some real data. My job was to write a process to fetch our sales data from the AS400 server here at work nightly and populate some SQL Server tables with it. Easy Peasy, I thought. I didn't know what I was in for.

I am writing some SQL to pull data from our AS400 here at work. I was getting the error "Arithmetic overflow error converting expression to data type datetime." from the following code where date_column contained a date formatted like 20080930: year(date_column) At first, I thought there was some bad data in the column. It turns out, the datatype was int as opposed to varchar like I had assumed. This fixed it: year(cast(date_column as varchar(8)))

So in the past 3 days I have been trying Flex I've had several out of memory errors that crashed my browser. I don't know if it is my operating system, my browser, Flash in general, or Flex, but it sucks. For the record I am using Windows XP Pro, IE 7, Flash 9, and Flex 3. This is what happens: As I develop, I keep hitting save in Flex Builder, waiting for it to recompile in the background, then Alt-tabbing over to IE and whacking F5 to refresh. Well, over the course of 2 or 3 hours of doing this, the memory usage for iexpolore.exe just keeps climbing and climbing as though there is a memory leak or garbage collection isn't happening.

Flex objects extending the UIComponent class have two events that fire during their creation process. The "initialize" event fires when the object is starting to be created, but before its children are created. "creationComplete" fires after that object and all its children have been created. There is a great post and example here. I found this out while trying to figure out an intermittent error I was getting when loading my Flex app that was related to trying to access an object prior to its creation.

Well, to add to my list of interesting errors encountered with Flex; yesterday I started getting a JavaScript "Permission Denied" when I tried to run my app. The app would run fine but I would get that error every time the page loaded. After commenting out a bunch of stuff, I realized it had started when I added the mx:TabNavigator tag. I finally traced the error down to some JavaScript in the history/historyframe.html file which controls deep linking.

Wow, I don't know if I have ever been so happy to get such a simple piece of code working. I have jumped into Flex 3 with basically no knowledge in order to make some charting functionality and I can confirm that I hate learning new stuff. I mean, I love it AFTERWARDS; but that time at the very beginning when you don't have a clue why your code won't work, Google isn't your friend, and you swear you're the first person in the world to have just received that weird error message-- yeah, that is the part that sucks.

There has been a lot of talk recently about design patterns aimed at circumventing the overhead ColdFusion imposes upon us when creating CFCs. I'm not sure who coined the term "Object Instantiation Penalty", but the first reference to it I can find in the CF community was over at the Dot Matrix blog. Everyone seems to agree that object creation in ColdFusion leaves something to be desired, but I haven't seen anyone really quantify the price yet. I decided some line charts were in order.