The enhancements to the data grids in Flex 3 have been eagerly anticipated, and are greatly appreciated – especially by us ColdFusion developers who spend so much time creating highly data-centric applications. I plan on providing examples of how to use the new data grids with ColdFusion, and here is the first.
AdvancedDataGrid supports group expanding and collapsing within grids, think of it as a grid with an embedded tree control. Multiple levels of grouping are supported (each level becomes a tree branch), but this example uses a single level for simplicity’s sake.
The example uses the default database tables that come with ColdFusion 8, and here is the simple CFC method which just returns several columns from two tables:
SELECT mediatype, artname, description, price
FROM media, art
WHERE media.mediaid=art.mediaid
ORDER BY mediatype, artname
I saved this component as art.cfc in a folder named test beneath the web root. You can save it wherever you like, but of course you’ll need to adjust the path in the MXML accordingly. Here is the MXML:
When using GroupingCollections like this, the data grid itself must explicitly be refreshed so that the changes are reflected in the displayed grid. According to the documentation, this example would do this as
And there you have it, a really simple data grid with expand/collapse grouping.
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