Here's a way to create keyboard shortcuts for your flash forms. You can pretty much map any key sequence to perform a specified function. In the example, I'm showing a quick way to jump between tabs in a tab navigator with CTRL-1, CTRL-2 & CTRL-3. Note: Don't try the 1,2 & 3 in your num pad - I'm guessing they're mapped differently.

Check out the example.

Here's the code:

Just found a pretty cool little application for viewing and editing shared objects. It's called SolVE and it was created by Darron Schall. It's a pretty helpful little tool, check it out!

One of the downsides of working with an editable CFGRID in a Flash form is the inability to use validation on the individual grid columns. Of course, server side validation should always be done and should catch any bad data - but it never hurts to throw in some client side validation. The technique below allows you to create custom validation rules for individual columns giving you the extra security of some client side catches. Ray Camden has a good post showing a simliar method for grid validation, but this technique allows for a little more flexibility and does not require looping over the entire grid to check for valid inputs. In this method a few listeners are employed which catch some built in events that the grid broadcasts (specifically the cellFocusOut and cellEdit events). This gives us the ability to immediately catch the invalid inputs and do things like blank out the cell, disable controls when we catch the bad data, reset the focus to the invalid cell, round decimals to integers, and endless additional possibilities.

Here's an example.

The code is below.

I just stumbled across this post that shows how to dynamically disable an accordion page in Flex. Like most good Flex tips, it works perfect in Flash Forms too. Check it out.

I'm not quite sure how useful this will be since it's mostly undocumented stuff and you really can't do much with it, but it's still pretty cool. Ever wish you could add or delete tabs in a tab navigator in a Flash form? What about dynamically enabling/disabling (or hiding/showing) them on the fly? Use at your own risk since they'll likely be locked down in future versions of CF.

Oh yeah, see this post for a more technical explanation as to why you shouldn't use these features.

See a demo.

As promised in my last post, here is an example of creating a custom cell renderer for a select in a cfgrid. To be fair, the code isn't my own (though I can't seem to find where I originally found it. This example is purely to show that the custom renderer can be applied to a cfgrid within a Flash Form and can easily be customized to meet your individual needs.

The dataprovider is hardcoded in this example, but I imagine it could easily be dynamic with a little Flash remoting. The cool thing is that existing grid data item is pre-selected if it exists in the select's dataprovider. In the example, you'll also see that when the selected item changes, the data is populated in the appropriate grid cell.

Here's the code - first the cfm page:

Now the ComboBoxCell.as - residing in the same directory as the cfm page:

Live Example.

Jari asks:

"Would it be possible to use an mxml custom cell renderer to add on a cfgrid a checkbox, which would fire the onclick events."

The short answer is "kinda" - I'm guessing it could be done with mxml (as I did in this post but i'm not quite sure how to tackle it that way since I've yet to dig too deep into Flex. However, there is an easier way to go get the cell renderer to do what Jari is looking for using Actionscript.

Using the type="boolean" attribute of the cfgridcolumn presents us with a handy checkbox in the grid column. The only problem with this checkbox is that checking/unchecking it does not fire any events within the grid. To get around this restriction, we simply have to modify the custom cell renderer that is used to create the checkbox.

The cfm page looks like this:

The only thing I've done special here is call the setCellRenderer function onload of the form which sets the cell renderer of the second column of the grid to be CustomCheckCellRenderer.

The code for CustomCheckCellRenderer.as follows (saved within the same directory of the cfm page):

You can view a live example here.

In my next post, I'll show how to modify this concept to create a custom renderer for a select in a grid.

I'm always the last to figure these kind of things out, but I thought I'd share with the 5 people out there who haven't figured this out yet like me.

Ever want to make a text area read only (maybe based on permissions, or for any other reason)? In HTML we had the "readonly" attribute, but there is no "readonly" attribute for cftextarea. You could disable the control, but then users couldn't copy the text or even scroll if the text was longer than the given height. So what to do? Actionscript to the rescue!

The trick is to set the textarea's editable attribute to "false." Put some actionscript in the onfocus of the textarea (or do it onload, or wherever the hell you feel like putting it) kinda like this:

Here's a simple technique for creating a multiline header in a Flash Form. It's not terribly dynamic, but it works in a pinch.

Here's the code:

I'm happy to announce the release of Genesis 1.0 (Query Evaluation Tool built on Flash Forms). There are a ton of updates in this release thanks to some really great feedback from some of the folks who downloaded the initial release.

Some highlights of this release:

• Added Stored Procedures, Views, and Indexes to the Object Browser (MSSQLSERVER only). Stored procs and views can be scripted to the query window by selecting the proc or view and right clicking in the query window. Currently Genesis supports returning a single resultset when calling a stored proc.
• Added clear query button.
• Added copy to clipboard button to copy the current results to the client's clipboard.
• Added query logging.
• Made results grid editable to allow users to copy single cell results to clipboard.
• Added selective querying. When working in the query window if a user would like to run a single sub-query they can highlight just the code they would like to run and click Execute Query.
• Misc other fixes throughout.