MACROMEDIA FLASH MX 2004-USING FLASH Use Manual page 264

The following illustration shows the runtime process of the data binding engine. The four
attributes that handle data types are shown in the illustration and discussed in the following text.
DataType
Formatter
Convert to String
Encoder
Kind
from component
Kind When Flash wants to get data from a component, the data is fetched from the component
according to the Kind setting. At this point, the data is in whatever format the component
provides (the raw form of the data). For example, the XMLConnector component always
provides data as a string, the NumericStepper component provides data as a Number, and so on.
Encoder
The encoder's job is to convert this data to an ActionScript data type. For example,
the string data that you get from an XML document can represent a date or a number. If data
binding needs the data in string form (because it is being assigned to a text component, for
example) the formatter does this conversion. If there are several bindings from a field, the
formatter is used only for those bindings that are assigning to a field whose type is String.
264 Chapter 14: Data Integration (Flash Professional Only)
GET DATA
(maybe)
Convert from String
Convert from
raw form
Fetch raw data
Component
SET DATA
Type conversion
Validation
(maybe)
Convert into
raw form
Store raw data
into component