The new release of Cairngorm 3 beta was a good news for me but after a quick study about Cairngorm 3 I have found that several of the Cairngorm 3 libraries are implemented as extensions to the Parsley Application Framework

Because I am a very curios guy I have read a little more about Parsley Application Framework and I have to say that Jens Halm made a very good job with this framework. Parsley Framework offers you a lot of flexibility and the framework is easy to extend. Some of the cool features of the framework are :

• Dependency Injection
• Messaging ( this is my favorite )
• Flex Modules support
• Localization

Parsley Framework is good documented but I have not found a good and simple example of using Parsley. So I decided to write this article and post a simple example that can help you to understand how to create a MVC application using Parsley .

You can see the application down (username: admin, password: admin )

If you have any questions post them here.

View the example | View Source

Recently I have work on a custom component that extend the List class and add more functionalities to that class.The class do a lot of stuff but I decided to write a simple example for the blog that show just one functionality. The problem that this example solve is very simple:

“Make a list control that allow to drag only some of the list items”

The final result looks like this:

The steps to this are:

1) Create a list control and enable drag and drop

<mx:List
        id=”plList”
        width=”300″
        height=”300″
        dragEnabled=”true”
        dragMoveEnabled=”true”
        dropEnabled=”true”
        dragOver=”listDragOverHandler(event)” />

2) Create a XML that we will use as a dataProvider

<mx:XML id=”playlists”>
     <root>
          <pl name=”Playlist1″ icon=”myIcon” canMove=”1″ />
          <pl name=”Radio” icon=”myIcon2″ canMove=”0″ />
          <pl name=”Random” icon=”myIcon” canMove=”1″ />
          <pl name=”Best 90″ icon=”myIcon” canMove=”1″ />
          <pl name=”Custom” icon=”myIcon2″ canMove=”0″ />
     </root>
</mx:XML>

if you look at the XML you will see that a playlist contains 3 attributes. The name, icon and canMove. The canMove is the important attribute for us because this attribut will tell us if a item can move or not. Now that we have the XML let’s tell our list that we want to use this XML as a dataProvider and the name attribute as label:

<mx:List
        id=”usersList”
        width=”300″
        height=”300″
        dragEnabled=”true”
        labelField=”@name”
        iconField=”@icon”
        dataProvider=”{playlists.pl}”
        dragMoveEnabled=”true”
        dropEnabled=”true”
        dragOver=”listDragOverHandler(event)” />

3) Create a function that will be called when a list item is drag

private function listDragOverHandler( event:DragEvent ):void
{
        // with this call we are telling that we will
        // handle the drag
        event.preventDefault();

        // check to see if selected item can move
        var selectedItem :XML = XML(plList.selectedItem);
        var move :Number = Number(selectedItem.attribute(’canMove’));

        // if drag item can move
        if (event.dragSource.hasFormat(”items”) && move)
        {
                // Drag allowed
                event.currentTarget.showDropFeedback(event);
                DragManager.showFeedback(DragManager.MOVE);

                return;
        }

        // Drag not allowed.
        event.currentTarget.hideDropFeedback(event);
        DragManager.showFeedback(DragManager.NONE);
}

And this is all. If you have any questions post them here.

View the example | View Source