Inline conditionals, coding, if then’s whatever you want to call it is soooo easy yet has been a pain in the royal _ _ _ for me to find maybe its the search terms I have been Google’ing I don’t know.

Hello! Hows it going? Alright the guy who has to go to the restroom, go now, make some popcorn and come back. Good now that were all cozy i’m going to explain this series.

I’m going to in a series of posts walk you through the initial steps of what I like to call Performance Refactoring. I refer to it as such because I am not going to concentrate on just the code, just the app, just the web server etc. We’re going to look at it all. This is necessary with today’s technologies for a lot of reasons, but for enterprise level applications to not do performance checking can be deadly.

I recently built a JavaScript file manager but I wanted more control and better usability instead of expanding on the JavaScript version I decided to build it using Flex. Because Flex doesn’t have file system commands (that I know of) I had to use a server side language. We use VBScript at our company so I used that for the backend. I will be expanding this to other languages the next one to be released will be .NET C# as that seems to be what people polled for.

Before we get started download “One Headlight” by the Wallflowers. Yea its a bit old but still rocks!

Now that have some music jamming in the background lets get started.

We need an ASP.NET web service if you don’t already have one create it; if you do then great. This example code is in C# it can easily be done in VB as well.

1. Let’s add an import to the top

using System.Web.Mail;

This is probably one of the easier things to do in Flex. Yea you could probably find out how to do this by reading the Adobe Flex Documentation but who wants to read that when you have Google at your fingertips.

What the Adobe Flex Documentation wont tell you is how to format your date and time inside of a DataGrid or other components.  No worries I do!

Here is how you format a date pulled in as XML, E4X or whatever…

First you will need a DateFormatter

<mx:DateFormatter id="formatDateTime" formatString="MM/DD/YY" />

You have imported your data using either an HTTPService, Web Service or some other means. Great! now how do you filter and sort the data? Using E4X of course! Lets get started.

1st. Switch the resultFormat on your HTTPService or Web Service by adding the following property resultFormat=”e4x” to your tag:

<!-- HTTPService -->
<mx:HTTPService id='data' resultFormat="e4x"/>
<!-- Web Service -->
<mx:WebService id="wsData" wsdl="http://www.domain.com/Service.asmx?WSDL" showBusyCursor="true">
      <mx:operation name="getData" resultFormat="e4x">

So you gave up on trying to figure out how you can directly connect Flex to your database like with any server side language and decided to Google the answer. Well by now you probably figured out that your building a “client” application not a server side application.

So whats the best approach in achieving what you want? I have no clue, I do however have a solution that I put together using ASP.NET C#, Web Service, some duck tape and lot of Tylenol which makes getting at and querying your data just as easy as using SQL Manager which is actually a hell of a lot easier than querying your data with any server side code.