Flex sample application
Restaurant Finder
The Restaurant Finder application shows how to use the Adobe Flex SOAP web-service support for CRUD operations in a master-detail type application. The default state shows a list of all restaurants in the system. When you click on a restaurant, the details about that restaurant and summaries of reviews appear. When you select a summary, the details of the review appear. You can add reviews to the review list. You can also filter the list of restaurants by restaurant type.
There is also an application to view the 10 most recent restaurant reviews. From the recent reviews application, click the restaurant name. The Finder application opens with the restaurant selected. The recent reviews application shows how Flex can interact with RESTful style web services in addition to the SOAP-style web services. A small component like this could be a useful addition to a larger site like a portal.
This application is accessible to users with disabilities. You can use the application with the keyboard alone, and the contents can be read by a screen reader. Since this application has a fairly linear flow of control, it was well suited to change into an accessible application.
Flash Player 9 is required to view this application.
To download and view the full source, right-click the Flex application and select View Source from the context menu.
Requirements
To view this sample application, you need the following software and files:
Flash Player 9
Sample Files
To download and view the source code for this sample, browse the application, right-click the sample, and select view source. You will find detailed instructions for implementing and deploying the application in the ReadMe for the application.
Flex framework features
The Restaurant Finder shows how simple it is to build CRUD applications on top of SOAP services. Serialization and deserialization of SOAP requests and responses is automatically handled by Flex (though you'll see that we do convert some objects into strongly typed classes on our own). Developers interact with SOAP services in a simple RPC fashion, dealing with objects, not SOAP packets, headers, and so on.
The recentReviews application shows how easy it is to use an HTTPService to get data from the server. Although you could use the data directly, this application creates a strongly typed class that provides type safety in other parts of the application.
The ReviewThumbnail class shows how you can use states in components to edit in-context. This class contains summary and detail views, maintains loose coupling, and maximizes component reuse. The Restaurant Finder application also shows how you can use transitions to control the appearance of moving from one state to another.
The entire application demonstrates how the tabIndex property can be used to control tab order for an application with a dynamic user interface. The ReviewThumbnail component demonstrates one approach to ensuring proper tab order when states introduce additional complexity. You can use data binding to assign to the tabIndex, which simplifies the task tremendously.
