jun :: realeyes

I’m bringin’ the paper bags, and Tom and John are supplying the contents.  Just kidding.

Although on a more serious note, if you don’t want the above happening, please hit their site and comment on your beverage preferences:

http://tinyurl.com/4k9ads

Also, if you still haven’t registered, you need to.  360 Flex is where all the cool RIA developers hang yo!

http://360flex.eventbrite.com/

Is it *dedication* or would a better word be *sick* that I wrote an InsideRIA article here in my hotel room during a family vacation in Florida?  Anyway, for those of you interested, you can read it here:

http://www.insideria.com/2008/06/flex-ria-performance-considera-2.html

Ok…off to Disney World.  I wonder how many times my son’s gonna want to ride Buzz?

A student of mine decided to use Doug McCune’s CoverFlowContainer component in his class project.  He also wanted to enable drag/drop from one CoverFlowContainer to the next so I took what he had and added some Drag/Drop to it.

There were a couple things he needed supported in the drag/drop:

• Drag image data from one coverflow component to a child array container in another coverflow component
• Show the original image as the drag image
• Only allow dragging into the proper coverflow  in other words don’t allow dragging an image into a coverflow using image data children…only one using crate data children.

So…there were a couple things that weren’t quite too fun to work with:

• The immediate child of the CoverFlowContainer was a Repeater, getting everything to play nicely without being too kludgy required a custom component and a custom event.
• When trying to create an Image clone by just setting the source attribute, it wouldn’t be rendered in the drag image.  Found a post discussing how to work around it by using the BitmapData and BitmapAsset classes. (Unfortunately, I can’t find the post in my delicious anymore…will update this if I do)
• The DragManager.doDrag() requires a MouseEvent as it’s third parameter…amazingly casting a MouseEvent subclass silently breaks it.  So I just added the source MouseEvent as a parameter to my subclass.

I know the code probably isn’t optimal, and if you know a better way to do things feel free to comment on my blog.  However, being that it was a pain I figured I’d make the sample available for anyone feeling like taking a peek.

Anyway, below is a sample of the running app…view source is enabled.  Also, if you want to download the Flex Builder 3 Project Archive file, here’s the link:

http://www.iheartair.com/samples/CodeZips/CoverFlowDragDrop.zip

Sample: