Webmaster Forum / Flash / Data Integration / October 2005

You won't find many examples on advanced and really useful and competitive
ideas. This is a special policy of Macromedia :-)

Don't forget the common idea is if you want to much programming freedom, then
get Macromedia Flex. Flash is great but when you stat to ask yourself how to
use it in special occasions, then you are on your own. Seriously, sometimes I
really think this, based on the things Macromedia do since a long time.

Why? Ask MM. Except some of their late examples, all the other ones coming
even from them are the easy and simple ways to place a component, or bind data
with connectors. Take a look of so many Flash books, 98% garbage. Good stuff
for simple solutions. When need flexibility, should read all away in Internet
but Macromedia.

Anyway. My personal suggestion or your problem is get rid of the useless Xml
Connector and start learning XML / XMLNode objects and how to access them
through classes and dispatching events.

And something more. What exactly do you mean by xml dataset? ASP.NET
server-side one, visually placed on the timeline DataSet or dynamically created
piece of ode?

To bind the things together and to expand them in future, create a class with
some basic abstract methods to do all the common work and then execute them for
the different components. Say List and Combo can access one and the same method
of a class to extract some XML data), etc.

Explain in detail and the exact project and then I can write some code to
solve this out.

Thanks,

Dimitar

Basically, if I'm understanding you, is that you want to filter the xml results
w/ a combobox. The way I've always gone about this is to bind the XML connector
to 2 separate datasets.

-dataset1 bound to the XML connector and your combobox
-dataset2 bound to the XML connector and your listbox

1) add a change event listener to the combobox
2) in the change handler, filter dataset2 (the listbox's dataset) based on the
selection from the combobox. Because of the binding of this dataset to the
listbox, the listbox display will update w/ the filtered values.

I've successfully used this method as the basis to do some pretty complex
filtering. For example, filtering data in apps with many users in different
divisions/regions of an organization.

Choose Division (filters region combobox dataset) > Choose Region (filters
employee combobox dataset) > Choose Employee (filters the main dataset and
displays that employees info in a datagrid)