Subtitle: I'm a noob and I'm pretending like this is a theoretical example.

I'm going to borrow a page from the Jedimaster's playbook and present this scenario as a "puzzler" to the CF community. I know it will seem a little naive and noobish, but hell - a lot of my posts show that I'm noobish and well, I really don't care. I always say if you're not going up you're going down - so I always try to gain more knowledge and if it helps someone else out there along the way then cool.

So here's the scenario: In my last post I shared a UDF that I had written earlier today that I plan to use to help me efficiently page through query results using a Flex datagrid. Bruce Phillips commented that he thought it would be interesting to try and recreate this functionality within the Flex front end with Actionscript. I started to reply in the comments, but decided to turn the issue into a whole new post. While his logic is valid in that it avoids recurring calls to the component, that idea wouldn't quite work in my scenario. Why wouldn't it work you may ask, well that's the noobish part. Let me give a little background to my application (without spoiling too much since it's still 'top secret').

Essentially the Flex application will deal with a potentially large dataset (for those in the OO crowd you could call this the 'gateway'). Since the dataset can grow quite large I planned to cache the data to improve performance. To do so, I created a query in my components instance and planned to cache the query in the instance data when the component is init()'d (onApplicationStart). My Flex app will interact with the component via a proxy component which will return the base component from the application scope. So far, so good. Now I have a query that can be returned to the Flex front end (and paged via the UDF I created). Finally, here's the part I still don't feel comfortable with. My component will have the standard CRUD methods for interacting with the dataset - not DAO's per se (because I just ain't that cool yet), but rather simple methods to add/update/delete items. My thought is that when the standard add/update/delete happens I could simply use some utility functions to add/update/delete the query in the instance data (yeah, that's the part you can laugh at). Doing so will keep the instance data 'live' and keeping it in the instance will ensure that the data is available to all active sessions upon there next call to the component.

If you're still with me - thank you ;). So what are my alternatives? Obviously I could create a refresh method and call it on A/U/D - but it seems like that would defeat the benefits of caching (if the cache has to constantly be updated).