Month: October 2008

Flex Tip: How to get all items (ignoring the filter) in an ArrayCollection

If you have an ArrayCollection with a filter function set and you loop through the items, you’ll only see the items which match the filter. The catch is sometimes you want to see them all. Initially I was doing the following.

var filterFunction:Function = arrayCollection.filterFunction;
arrayCollection.filterFunction = null;
arrayCollection.refresh();
			
for each (var obj:Object in arrayCollection)
{
	// do stuff
}
			
arrayCollection.filterFunction = filterFunction;
arrayCollection.refresh();

This worked but was pretty ugly. Here’s a nicer approach:

for each (var obj:Object in arrayCollection.source)
{
	// do stuff
}

What I keep finding in Flex is that I’m able to come up with complex code to solve simple problems but when I revisit it months later there’s usually a more straight-forward solution.

Hope this helps,
Hillel

Flex DataGrid: Click once to select, click twice to edit

In the application I’m working on there’s a datagrid which when the user selects a row we update the info on the side page. The catch was we also enabled editing in the datagrid. It was strange to click the row to see the details on the side and then immediately be in edit mode.

Initially we required that the user double-click a field to edit it. The solution was based on the comment provided by Jana in this post.

The concern was that a user may not realize that you needed to double-click to edit the field. In the code provided below the user can select a row by clicking it. If they then click a field in the selected row it will switch in to edit mode.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:DataGrid xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
	
	<mx:Script>
		<!&#91;CDATA&#91;
			import mx.controls.listClasses.IListItemRenderer;
			import mx.events.ListEvent;
			
			private var _selectedRow:int = -1;
			private var _clickCount:uint;
			
			override protected function mouseUpHandler( event:MouseEvent ):void 
			{
				editable = (_clickCount == 2);
				
				super.mouseUpHandler( event );													
			}
			
			override protected function selectItem( item:IListItemRenderer, shiftKey:Boolean, ctrlKey:Boolean, transition:Boolean=true ):Boolean
			{
				var returnValue:Boolean = super.selectItem( item, shiftKey, ctrlKey, transition );
				
				if (selectedIndex == _selectedRow)
				{
					_clickCount = 2;
				}
				else
				{
					_selectedRow = selectedIndex;
					_clickCount = 1;
				}
				
				return returnValue;			
			}
			
		&#93;&#93;>
	</mx:Script>

</mx:DataGrid>

Hope you find this helpful,
Hillel