Chapter 14: Data Integration (Flash Professional Only) - MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING FLASH Use Manual

Data Integration (Flash Professional Only)
Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 provides a flexible, component-based architecture and
object model for connecting to external data sources, binding data to user interface (UI)
components, and managing what data is displayed and how it's updated at the source.
The Macromedia website and Flash Help has many tutorials on creating rich Internet data
applications in Flash. For downloadable examples and tutorials that use the data components, see
"Additional resources" on page
This chapter begins with an overview of data integration, provides a quick example you can walk
through to become familiar with how data integration works, provides general workflows, and
then explains data binding, which is the core functionality of the Flash data integration
architecture, and the other layers in the Flash data integration architecture.
There are four main layers in the Flash data integration architecture:
•
The data binding layer provides a way to map data elements to properties of Flash data
components, which can then be mapped to UI components. In other words, you bind to a data
source and then select the elements you need to display in your application and to update the
source. Flash also integrates objects such as formatters and encoders to let you control how data
is propagated and formatted among components. See
on page 259.
•
The data connectivity layer provides connector components that let you connect to an external
data source to send and receive data. You can connect to a variety of sources, such as web
services and XML. For more information, see
on page 274.
•
The data management layer provides a component that enables intelligent supervision of
common data operations, such as editing, sorting, filtering, aggregation, and translation of
changes. For more information, see
on page 280.
•
The data resolution layer provides resolver components that can translate changed data into a
format that is consumable by an external data source. In addition, these components can
accept and translate updates from an external data source so that they can be consumed by a
Flash client. For more information, see
on page 286.
255.
"Data connectivity (Flash Professional only)"
"Data management (Flash Professional only)"
"Data resolution (Flash Professional only)"
CHAPTER 14
"Data binding (Flash Professional only)"
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