Simeon Says

Anybody else coming in around midnight tonight to Regan in DC? 
I am and i am looking to share a cab.  Why am I in such a
position? Well i got to the airport, right on schedule, 1 hour to
departure.  Wait what is that?  You say my flight is
delayed?  Well that cant be.  If this flight is delayed then
my connecting flight into DC is delayed, and i am going to miss the
last Metro run.

Nothing new really, but I am not looking forward
to putting out the dime to get from the airport to the hotel. 
Anybody got any suggestions?  For cfunited barney was in this
spot, and lucked out that he found some folks that were also headed
this way so they split a shuttle.  I hope I am as lucky. :) 

Well I am not quite as excited as I was when cf7 first got released,
but I am still very excited.  The updator includes many bug fixes,
but also some very neat enhancments.  My favorite enhancements are
the features around the CF Flash Forms.  The first item that I
think just absolutly rocks is support for as directly in cfform via the
cfformitem tag.  This allows us to fix one of my pet peeves (as well as have much better formatting) about
flash forms, which is not being able to submit the form when the user
hits enter in a form field. Its certainly not a big deal, but as
I was showing off some forms I built recently it came up with several
users.

<cfform format="flash" onload="loader()">
<cfformitem type="script">
        function loader(){
            _root.mfname.addEventListener( "enter", textOnEnter );
            _root.mlname.addEventListener( "enter", textOnEnter );
            _root.memail.addEventListener( "enter", textOnEnter );
        }
        function textOnEnter(event) {
            //alert(event.target);
            _root.memberSearch(’searchList’);
        }

</cfformitem>

….. You get the point. Oh, and dont miss that onload for the flash form :) 

This
lilttle block of code allows me to register the same event listener for
each of the text inputs.  then I have a simple function that submits
my form for me.  i am sure that this could be done via the
previous AS injection methods, but i feel like this is a better
solution.  In truth this opens up a whole world of options and
will help us get around the 32K limit that some of the advance
flashforms have come up against.

The second little update that I
like quite a bit is something i found completly on accident. The
cfformitem type="html" now allows you to pass through and id. 
What this has allowed me to do is use as to update the contents of it
with AS without doing anything crazy.  For me this was a natural
element for putting in messages and updates for the user in a non
obtrusive way.

<cfformitem type="html" id="displayMsg"></cfformitem>
<cfformitem type="script">

    function updateMsg(){

       displayMsg.htmlText = "<b>What a great way</b> to alert users!";

    }

</cfformitem>
<cfinput type="button" name="btn" onclick="updateMsg()" value="Update"/>

These
are 2 of the changes that come to mind right away that I feel will
impact developers adoption of flash forms, so I wanted to share.

What are your favorite enhancements/bug fixes of the updator? 

I saw this post over at Remote Synthesis
on selecting radio buttons in flash forms.  I just finished a site
which makes use of the cf flash forms very extensivly, including a
multi step signup system that uses the accordian tool to seperate
sections, but that a user cant move back and forth through by clicking
on the tabs.

Anyway, the post centers around the need to select a
radio based on the data returned from a remoting call.  I wont get
into using remoting with flash forms because the gang over at AS Fusion
has done a great job with that. However I will post the code to access
the data from the results returned from a query as I had to sort it out
this week and it was not all that intuitive for me.

What
you need is in the onResult of your remoting call, you get the results
parameter as a query returned from CF (or whatever service you
called).  When assigning that to a datagrid or select which use a
dataProvider to keep things strait its very easy to do.  

dataGridName.dataProvider = results;

Which
let me to believe this was a straight forward thing.  Like perhaps
my query was actually contained directly in side results.  Well
that was not the case for me.  What I found is that in action
script the query is returned as an array, so you have to acess the row
which has your data and then pull out your field.  In my instance
the database field was "status" so my code to select a radio button
from a flash remoting call from ColdFusion looked like this:

_root.status.selectedData = results.getItemAt(0).status;

I hope that this can help someone else maybe not have to got through the problems that I had trying to sort that out.

I was scanning the rss feed today when i came accross this, " I’ve
begun learning Fusebox in preparation for the intro to Fusebox
preso."  I have to admit that this caught me off guard.  I
was under the impression that people paid to go to these conferences to
listen to experts present on topics in which they are knowledgable
and  feel passionate about.  Obviously Simon is taking the
steps become knowledgable, but the only passion he has ever expressed
is in opposition to it and frameworks in general.

So I would think you would see my dismay at the event orgainizers
choosing to follow such a route.  But then it dawned on me that
this has the opportunity to be a very informative presentation. 
Simon is a smart guy so I have no doubt he will do the topic justice,
but his position in opposition to frameworks make this unique.  He
could spin the presentation in the direction of the benifits he found
in fusebox, even if he doesnt choose to use it daily.  However I
think this may not be the right spin for an entry level topic, maybe
one more geared at informing the fusebox leadership of how it could
gain more acceptance from non-framework developers.

I think in going over this post I might have painted a grey
picture.  But I think I see a trend.  In the last few
conferences I have gone to I have seen Simon be the fill in guy when
other presentors dont work out.  So I know that its probably not
micheals fault, and I am sure Simon didnt pick this topic to begin
with.  But I guess my question is this, Isnt someone attending the
conference a fusebox user who could pick of this entry level
presentation?  Or is the intent to give some neat spin on a very
traditional topic?

PS.
My thoughs on Simon’s views of frameworks come from his work to stress
that you can build good sites without them.  Its a theme I have
seen in his presentations, and not anything I have personally heard him
say.  Anyone feel free to correct me :) 

We had a great meeting last night, Brad Fetter did an excellent job
of presenting many of the facets of Flash Forms.  He coverd the
basics of layouts, input types, validation and masking.  Even some
tips on integerating with normal forms to round out your
application.  Everyone had a great time.

Travis was the winner of last night "What is it?" game and in addition to getting a shiny new cfmx7 tag chart he chose "Laughing Planet Cafe"
as the location of our next cf_social.  So we will be meeting
there at 6:30pm on  October 13th.  Thats the second tuesday
of the month. 

Also dont forget that next month we have
Damon Gentry presenting on JVM Tuning.  That meeting will be held
at 6:30pm on the 20th.  Thats the day after many of us get back
from max.  And on that note, I have to say that I am very
impressed.  I asked last night at our meeting how many people were
planning on attending MAX this year and 5 hands went up.  And that
didnt include 4 other people from the pdx area that I know are
going.  I am very proud that we will be bringing such a presence
to MAX this year.

Also in tototally unrelated news, but somethign I am very excited about: AJ got the girl!!!!!!!

Tonight we will have Brad Fetter presenting on CF Flash Forms. 
Brad has put together a great presentation that outlines basic
funcionality and builds up to AS injection to build advanced forms.

It
promises to be a great presentation.  We are meeting at the
Beaverton Library Conference room.  Directions are linked from the
PDX CFUG site.  Meeting starts at 6pm.  See you there!