Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 33. Advanced Data Controls

This chapter will cover the advanced data controls built into the Flex framework. It will also touch on how to interact with them and examine some of the main ways to customize their display. The following controls will be discussed:

• mx.controls.Tree

• mx.controls.DataGrid

• mx.controls.AdvancedDataGrid

• mx.controls.OLAPDataGrid

  Both the AdvancedDataGrid and the OLAPDataGrid are only available via the Flex Visualization Components bundled with Flex Builder 3 Professional.

Overview

As framework developers, we're always on the search for elements that can be integrated into our applications to provide large amounts of functionality with a minimal investment of writing new code. The Flex framework provides many controls that meet this criteria, and the advanced data controls are no exception.

The advanced data controls were designed with displaying large amounts in mind. Coupled with an adequately robust data provider, the advanced data controls and their core data provider classes offer an extensive API to allow the developer to perform data filtering, sorting, manipulation, and data display customizations.

Chapter 30 and Chapter 32 have set the stage and supporting infrastructure to allow us to take advantage of these robust controls. Now that we've built the foundation, let's examine what we can build on top of it.

Tree

Chapter 30 discussed XML, a modern-day standard for descriptively marking up data. Coupling XML with the Collections API that we also discussed ...