Ajax and Flex2 Together With Nitobi
Filed in archive AJAX on October 18, 2006
Are you aware of the Nitobi's Flex Ajax dashboard which is one of the best combinations of Ajax and Flex 2 using the FA Bridge? You can check the demo at Dave' blog.
Using the FABridge along with the Nitobi Ajax Grid and Adobe Flex Charting, we have created a scenario where one can view monthly sales data and then see the sales details for the month in both a tabular format in a grid and visually represented in a Flex chart.
Under the hood we have used PHP and MySQL to provide the data to both the data grids and the chart. When a user clicks on a record in the sales data grouped by month, the details grid makes a request to the server for all the sales data for that month - this ends up being between 200 to 1000 records or so. To ensure that the details grid is still fast, we only render the part of the dataset that the user is looking at rather than rendering all 1000 records say, which can take a long time when you use the DOM innerHTML property. The other thing that happens when a month is selected in the master grid is that the Flex chart is also updated with information about the sales for that month, except that the sales data is then grouped by day. grouping of the sales data could either be done on the client or the server, however, since we have already retreived all the sales data for the month and displayed it in the detail grid we simply take that same data and group it very quickly using an XSL transformation (yes currently only IE and Moz but the latest Safari build also has it - finally!). The grouped data we output from the XSL transformation is actually formatted as JSON which is then evaluated into a JavaScript object and passed to the Flex chart for rendering.
Certainly Ajax developers would get an exposure to Flex's charting components with this combination. Ajax has just changed the face of web development but Flex is there to take care of some of its limitations such as data visualization. Ajax and Flex can certainly prove out top be deadly combination. Nitobi has proved this, right?
Thnx Ryan
Under the hood we have used PHP and MySQL to provide the data to both the data grids and the chart. When a user clicks on a record in the sales data grouped by month, the details grid makes a request to the server for all the sales data for that month - this ends up being between 200 to 1000 records or so. To ensure that the details grid is still fast, we only render the part of the dataset that the user is looking at rather than rendering all 1000 records say, which can take a long time when you use the DOM innerHTML property. The other thing that happens when a month is selected in the master grid is that the Flex chart is also updated with information about the sales for that month, except that the sales data is then grouped by day. grouping of the sales data could either be done on the client or the server, however, since we have already retreived all the sales data for the month and displayed it in the detail grid we simply take that same data and group it very quickly using an XSL transformation (yes currently only IE and Moz but the latest Safari build also has it - finally!). The grouped data we output from the XSL transformation is actually formatted as JSON which is then evaluated into a JavaScript object and passed to the Flex chart for rendering.
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Tags: flex2 ajax java data nitobi ajax+flex2 flex2+together sales+data
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