• Created a fake data dictionary and filled it with data similar to that in the report Allen gave me for the forecasting report
• Created a sample application with a single report in it modeled after the paper report Allen gave me
• Attempted to deploy the sample to fgmdev but ran it to some difficulties
  • I first just created a directory structure in the webapps directory and pasted the required file (this worked locally but not on the server)
  • the logs said the directory was successfully deployed but got a 404
  • Tried creating a war with the same file, this also worked locally but not on the server
  • the logs again said everything was deployed fine but still getting a 404

Looked in to incorporating KapLab’s Kap Inspect.  It’s a runtime debug tool which lets you look at all existing UIComponents, their current properties, styles, and other items.  Unfortunately it’s written with heavy dependence on Flex 3 and you can’t use it in Flex 4 without making some changes to Flex builder and your sdk directories.  The source is available but very large and I don’t want to spend a week trying to get some cool debug tool to work.

So it turns out Kap Inspect is based on another open source project with a much looser license: FlexSpy.  It has a few less features than Kap Inspect, but works in Flex 4 without any changes and still allows access to styles and properties so I added it to our framework as another debug window.  We may need to hide it when moving to production.

Enter Monkey Patching.  It is apparently possible to inject code in to any existing class by recreating the file in your project, placing it at the same package location, and changing anything inside the file you want.  Your class will the override the Flex library class and any class that extends will inherit your class, not the original one.  Doug Mccune came up with a way to override mx.core.FlexSprite (the base class of all flex components) and add a dictionary which keeps references whenever addEventListener is called.  This allows a debug window to view all event listeners on any component.  So I put together FlexSpy and the monkey patched Flex Sprite to get a very useful new debug window.

Working on a run-time config menu for advanced data grids, this menu will need to include:

• A hierarchical display of columns and a way to edit them since some columns will have multiple sub-columns and why stop there
• A way to ‘roll-up’ data based on one or more columns, this will give the appearance of rows having children rows even though the data will be flat

Started working on the first bullet with a tree / datagrid hybrid:

• Have a tree / datagrid list with existing columns in it and editable headerText fields
• Had a list of available columns and was planning on dragging / dropping from it but after lots of messing around it is apparently not easy to drag and drop from a list of flat data to a list of hierachical data
• decided to simply go with DropDownList and add/remove buttons

Did a quick example of Java to Java AMF as well as did some reading on Deep Linking in flex.