The Flex DataGrid is a very powerful and useful component but there are some things that it just won't do out of the box. One of the features that is built in but not used by default is custom sorting functions. The DataGrid will sort most basic object types by default, but if you have a complex object that you need to sort it has to be done using a custom function. This tutorial is going to show how to build and use a custom sorting function in a DataGrid.

One of the neat things about World of Warcraft is the amount of data freely available. Between sources like Thottbot, Wowhead, and WoW Armory you can find information on just about anything in the game. The WoW Armory is even more interesting because it sends all of its data to the browser in xml. This makes it really easy to consume this data through web requests. This tutorial is about building a small application that searches the Armory for items.

When working with Flex one component almost always shows up, the DataGrid. Now it may not just be the DataGrid but any List based control. It is rare that I create any type of data driven application and not use one of these controls. Along with displaying information it is also useful to be able to add data. Today, I am going to go over a method that can be used for this task. The way we are going achieve data insertion is by using a popup that will hold a simple form to fill out.

There are many ways to retrieve data in Flex, one of the easiest and most used methods is utilizing the HTTPService component. Explaining how to use this object to gather photos from Flickr is exactly what this tutorial is about. Included is an explanation of how we can send requests and handle their results using simple http web requests.

Sometimes in Flex the simple things are more obscure than they should be. This is the case for making a hand cursor show up for a button or label or practically any other component. Now this is a fairly easy thing to do, you just need to know exactly what attributes to set on the component.

Last week was Adobe Max, the biggest Adobe conference. This is always the event where Adobe announces all of their fun and interesting projects. They usually go over any product updates also, as they did this year with the CS4 suite. I wasn't lucky enough to get to go this year but the web is a wonderful place where I was able to keep up with it. The one issue is that it is sometimes hard to find the good stuff and this is the reason for this post.

One of the many ways of getting information in Flash and/or Flex is using FlashVars which can be passed in through the embedding mechanism. This method is used for many different things. It can be used to pass in a video to play or a simple parameter you don't want to define at compile time. You can see examples of this all over the web in places like Google Finance and YouTube.

A few days ago one of the other guys here on the blog talked about getting object information in C#, well today I am going to talk about doing the same basic task in Flex and Actionscript. This tutorial is going to take a look at two methods that will help get object information, describeType() and ObjectUtil.getClassInfo(). Both the aforementioned functions will return information about the object passed, they differ in how much information they return and how.

One of the many features in Flex is Binding and it is a very important one at that. A feature that I feel is closely related (but that we have not yet covered here on the blog) is the ChangeWatcher class. The ChangeWatcher class does pretty much what the name says - it watches for changes on objects. Note that the properties that can be watched by the ChangeWatcher must be bindable - hence the connection to binding. Today I am going to give a quick rundown on how it works.

One of the many things people want to do when using a DataGrid is adding new rows to the data. Now this can be done a bunch of different ways. One method is using a popup to handle adding items to the collection the grid is bound to. Another method is to add another row directly into the grid. This tutorial is going to focus on the second of the above methods.