• Investigated the issue with the analytics package loading oddly in WebDesk.  Can’t figure out why it scales and none of the other loaded SWFs do the same.  A work around would be to build the RFlexClient to load more directly in to WebDesk using the module / class loading capabilities instead of the SWFLoader component.  This would require a small rewrite of the RFlexClient.
• While investigating that, I made several improvements to the SWFLoader in WebDesk so resizing is more smooth, the minimize animation works and, in general, works smoother.
• Made a logo for WebDesk
• Started working on improving the appearance of the Welcome Screen but delayed that in order to focus on passing login information to loaded subapplications
• Login information is now passed to any trusted loaded swf that contains a method called ‘login’.  This method should accept two arguments: username and password.  Following that method call, the subapplication is responsible for making the appropriate method calls to log in automatically.

• Created about pages for each piece in the Visibility Suite as well as added icons for each.  This makes the welcome screen for WebDesk look much more complete
• Fixed a bug in Webdesk caused when a user clicked to close a window then canceled
• Went through each Visibility product and loaded it from fgmdev.com in to my local WebDesk.  Fixed several small errors however ran in to weird errors with Analytics, will have to look more in to it

• Redid the way the Visibility Suite loads information from configuration files using Phil’s ConfigLoader and SingletonDataDictionary
  • Added the concept of namespace to the SingletonDataDictionary, all methods that used the data items name as reference now also have an optional argument called namespace that is a string and is used to distinguish similar named attributes
  • Gave namespaces to all the separate projects in Visibility and they now load configuration information based on those namespace.  Now all projects can share a single configuration file without overwriting eachother’s values.
  • Built, deployed and tested AccountManagers, IngestManager, and Visibility DataNavigator on FGMDev.com all three seem to be working fine

• It works!  I was able to load Visibility from fgmdev.com into WebDesk running on my local machine.  A few weird errors occur such as the minimize and maximize on the panel containing the swf loader throw security errors?  Will look at them next week.
• Upgraded to Flex 4.5.1 and tried installing the plugin in to Eclipse 3.7.  It’s not officially supported and I got a few errors trying to make a java / flex combined project.
• Installed Eclipse 3.6 and added the Flex plugin, no errors.  Working on migrating my workspace to the new installation and finalizing some of the server code for WebDesk.

• Added about screen to the Application Class factories
• Added the ability to have about screens on dynamically loaded application.  Must make sure the about screen class is compiled in to the swf in order for this to work.
• Dealing with remotely loaded swfs trying to load configuration files
  • Initially could not find config file as it was looking for a relative URL
  • Copied the config file to the local file system so it found it but now threw weird security errors.  From the messages it’s hard to tell which crossdomain required fixing, localhost or fgmdev.  Turns out it was localhost because I was loading the visibility swf from fgmdev to localhost and running from there.  The fgmdev swf then tried loading ‘assets/setupModel.xml’ from localhost but threw an error because the orginal domain is fgmdev which doesn’t have permission to load files from localhost even though it’s running from localhost…. my brain hurts.
• Resolved the security issue and now getting ‘an error occurred while attempting to display an error’ kind of message.  Or more specificially: “Cannot convert IOError to FaultEvent”.  So whatever method in visibilty that is responsible for handling the error is receiving the wrong object type.

• Reworked the welcome screen so each Application has it’s own description available prior to launching the app
• Redoing the module loading so for each IApp class a ClassFactory is passed around instead of a raw Class, this lets me attach things like titles, descriptions, and icons at run-time
• Created a generic SWF Loader IApp that, at run-time, a user may enter the url of a swf and load it as an application
  • Was able to load WebDesk inside of itself at total of 9 times before i ran out of room (Webception)
  • Trouble with loading visibility: the config file is not found since it is a relatively URL and not absolute, quick fix is to copy config files to local deployment
• Extended the ClassFactory implementation to allow pre-configuration of swf loaders
  • In the webdesk config file, I put a line describing a remote SWF I’d like to make available as an App
  • Once the applications starts, that app is loaded and added to the welcome screen beside all the other existing apps
  • This removes the requirement of the user entering in the URL

• Deployed the WebDesk and SCT Document tool to FGMDev and worked out several bugs in the process.  Did NOT add pages describing it or linking to it yet.
• Few more touches to the welcome screen.  Probably going to restructure it again to provide a description screen or each application
• Tried debugging an issue with the JDBC connection failing every night but my fix apparently didn’t work since I still had to restart stuff this morning
• Read some about Search Engine Optimization (SOE) for flash sites.  The most recommended way is to provide alternative html content for people without flash player and kill 2 birds with 1 stone.  For us, this could be as simple as copy / pasting the Visibilty, PPM, etc. descriptions to a couple simple HTML pages or as complicated as pulling them from a database for both the flash and html presentations.

• Created a number of example applications using the Webdesk framework:
  • One which simply loads xml configuration information and connects to a remote logging service defined in that config
  • One which loads several themes and backgrounds and allows the user to change them
  • One which loads a simple application module and adds it to the desktop, the sample application adds children windows as well
• Added a permissions check system to the SCT document manager application.  Before any user could do anything but now proper permissions and ownership of documents are enforced.  However, any user can view any document for now.
• Implemented a guest system.  Guests, for the SCT document manager, can only view documents.
• Created a welcome screen for Webdesk framework.  It displays all available applications from loaded modules and allows quick access to them.  In the future it may also allow quick access to recently viewed items

• Created a way to link to external web pages from within documents
• Created a preliminary way to link to other documents from within a document, clinking on a link brings up the document in a new panel
• Worked on removing a lot of build warnings
• Fixed an issue that caused panel titles to be missing
• made it so images do not have to have captions and thus waste less space
• Made a new text input component to allow editing of document section titles in place
• Ported some of the fgmdev site to the document system.  Came up with a list of needed improvements while doing so:
  • Editing of documents is very clunky and requires too many clicks / new screens, should be able to edit text in place
  • Saving needs to be done automatically whenever a major change is made
  • Configuring images is difficult, especially for large ones that can screw up the config screen.  Again, editing images in place instead of a new screen would be nice

• Got a lot done with the Document Management pane.  Users can:
  • Create new reports
  • Edit report meta data
  • Delete Reports they created
  • It also automatically keeps track of the last time the report was saved and who made the changes
• Had some difficulty when creating a new report mostly because a Flex Tree, when displaying an empty data provider, automatically puts in a branch that isn’t there.  It really screwed up my drag and drop report builder, but I hacked around it by putting in a temporary item if the report is empty
• Working on enabling internal and external linking through html text.  Once this is working the system should be able to support something resembling webpages.

• Completed a drag and drop interface for structuring Reports
  • The report structure is represented as a flex Tree object on the left side of the panel
  • A list of available section types is on the right side (Nodes, HTMLText, Image, and Table for now)
  • Users can drag items from the list to the tree to add sections to the report.
  • Users can also rearrange the report by dragging sections around the tree
  • Sections are removed by selecting them in the tree and pressing a ‘Remove’ button
  • The report updates immediately in the background whenever changes are made
• Now that users can modify reports, I’m starting work on a document management panel modeled after the main screen of Google Docs

Few more updated for 4.5 move:

• Replaced all instances of mx:datagrid
• Fixed an issue where AdvDataGrid Headers were blank
• Fixed an issue with the custom tooltips
• Fixed an issue with the open report screen throwing an error
• Fixed an issue with minimizing dynamic panels throwing an error (only occurred when coupled with the dock bar)

Other stuff:

• Created a default CSS and theme to match blah white of most basic flex spark components
• Wrote a data descriptor for the report navigation tree so the hierarchy is correctly displayed and navigated

• Resolved the mx.controls.Alert issues as well as the other weird build issues by creating a new Flex Library Project from Flash Builder 4.5 and copying over source files one package at a time.  Apparently something got very screwed up when I checked out the library project from svn.
• Updated the local log and debug log screens to use all spark components including the new spark data grid.  Had a few small issues getting the columns to automatically resize when the datagrid resizes.  Turns out defining no explicit column width results in pretty good automatic sizing and resizing.
• Spark textinputs and textareas now have self-labeling prompts built in so I quit using the custom ones i wrote and replaced them with the defaults.  Also, the prompts are built in to the skin files so this change broke all my themes.  I went through and fixed all the issues so they would compile again.
• Moved the last of the projects over to Flex 4.5, compiled and ran.  Most things are working just fine.  Several issues have arisen so far:
  • Custom Tooltips are throwing expections which also breaks the Mac-like task bar
  • AdvancedDataGrid headers have disappeared, no idea why…
  • Should go through and replace all mx.datagrids with spark.datagrids

• Back from vacation figuring out where I left off
• Decided it would be a good time to upgrade my current projects to Flex 4.5
• Self review
• Working on updating libraries to compile in 4.5, lots weird errors:
  • It appears impossible to import mx.controls.Alert in to a actionscript file…  I’ve found very little about this online but in order to move on I’ve removed all references to Alert from FGMUtils actionscript files for the time being
  • my next error is ‘Declaration of style ‘textDecoration’ conflicts with previous declaration in C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Flash Builder 4.5sdks4.5.0frameworkslibsspark.swc(spark.components.supportClasses:GroupBase)’ with an unknown location.  This error appears to have NOTHING to do with text decoration.  I’ve systematically deleted and restored classes until I narrowed it down to com.fgm.FGMUtils.ui.debug.CompilationDate which isn’t even a visual component,  just an object.  Currently trying to figure out what the problem is.

• Burned stand alone demo of reporting tool to CD for Brian
• An editor for modifying Text sections of reports is now complete
• An editor for modifying image sections of reports is now complete
• Added log / debug info access to the log in screen to help diagnose problems
• Working on an insert / remove, drag and drop system for creating report structures.  Users will be able to drag report section types together in to a Tree list to construct a hierarchical report structure and then go through and fill in each section with content.