I’ve recently been tasked with figuring this out so I thought I’d share my results with everyone.
The Problem:
Create a Flash/Flex horizontal menu that will overlap the content below it. We don’t know how big the menu might get or what kind of content might end up below it. We do know [...]

Continue reading...

Modifying your default build template is quite simple. There is a template file that is used when building your project. It should reside in the html-template directory at the root of your project in Flex Builder. In Flex Builder 3, the template is named “index.template.html”.
Let’s say you want to modify default parameters [...]

Continue reading...

Flex is great! Javascript can be great! What if two great things got together?
This is a simple code hint which shows how to call javascript functions from Flex and pass data back and forth:
MXML Button:
<mx:Button
id = “button”
label = “Click Me!”
click = “handleButtonClick(event:MouseEvent)
/>
Flex Function:
private function handleButtonClick(event:MouseEvent):void
{
var functionName:String = “handleButtonClick”;
var returnData:String = ExternalInterface.call(f, [...]

Continue reading...

I have been doing some work with AIR and SQLite recently and came across and issue that had to be solved. The issue was that most everything is a VARCHAR in SQLite and I was not able to insert apostrophes (’) into any string field because that is the string delimiter.
A quick [...]

Continue reading...

I ran into a situation recently which required me to parse a string into a Date object in Flex. After some searching I found that there’s a wonderful little method in the DateFormatter class called parseDateString. Unfortunately, that method is protected and I couldn’t gain access to it. Luckily, I came accross [...]

Continue reading...

I gave a presentation about Cascading Style Sheets and why they are important last night at the local Nebraska ColdFusion Users Group last night. Thanks to those who attended and brought questions.
For anyone interested, the presentation materials, including examples are available online at http://jake.cfwebtools.com/css_pres/css.zip.
As always, questions are welcome via my [...]

Continue reading...

How I’ve gone as far as I have without looking into this sooner is beyond me. Creating Custom Types is basically how I spend 80% of my time and I had hit a wall until now. Custom Types deserve custom config options so their behavior can be configured by the users. Here’s [...]

Continue reading...

I’ve been helping out with a flex project at work and have been learning some really cool things about it. Coming from a java background a lot of this is familiar but Flex has some really neat features built in.
One that I found recently is the Sort class in the collections package. [...]

Continue reading...

CF Webtools works on plenty of e-commerce sites. Some generate only a trivial amount of revenue and others generate millions every year. The most common implementations we see and deal with are authorize.net and paypal. Both have very standard APIs and a feature list that is continuously expanding. Recently I was [...]

Continue reading...

I’ve struggled with popups for some time now. I’ve never really found a good way to handle popping up a new window when clicking a link. Sure, there is the target=”_blank” method but I’ve heard that in XHTML1.0 that is not actually valid. That tells me that browsers can still handle this [...]

Continue reading...