chandra shekhar

Over 6 years of experience in Software Development including Analysis, Design and Development of various applications in Flash and Flex environment. Currently, I am associated with one of the India's leading IT company specialized in providing eLearning services, Magic Software Pvt. Ltd (http://www.magicsw.com).
In spare time I blog at http://actionscript.org and at my own weblog brupp.com

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This is small article which will detail out steps for creating a feed reader in flex. I know there are lot of feed readers in this world and I am not intended to leave a mark in that space. This article is actually a precursor to my next article which will be about “Cairngorm” framework in which I will take this as an example and base it on Cairngorm framework. So you will be able to compare which lies where in framework and why? If you want me to notify you when the next article is released either subscribe to the feed or leave your comment.

Before you read further, please download the source from here .

The essentials for creating the feed reader as you can see in code are:
a)  HTTPService object (non visual) – To make an HTTP request to the feed url. Note that the resultFormat is set to “e4x” and the result of this request will call “onResult(event)” method.

b) DataGrid - The result will get populated in this. Note that the dataProvider is bound to the _xlFeed in which the result will be populated.

c) TextArea - To show the content of the feed article when DataGrid row is selected.

The flow:

1) On creationComplete the HTTPService is invoked with send().
2) On receiving the result the _xlFeed value is set to the list of”item” nodes of the feed xml.
3) As a result the DataGrid shows the result in coloumns as title and published date (you can add more columns, DataGridColumn in the DataGrid)
4) Clicking on an item in DataGrid, extracts the “description” from that item (onItemClick method)
5) On double clicking the item, another node “link” is accessed from the feed and new webpage is launched (onItemDoubleClick method)

Play with other node values and get creative. Extend the application e.g. add feed urls at runtime etc. “Debug” run the application with breakpoint to observe feed structure. Most importantly you should have “namespace“s defined for rss and atom (depend on feed type)  other wise the application won’t work. If this article did any help to you then please spread the word and share this.

You can also read this (and more such) article at : http://blog.brupp.com