Flex and XML Portlet

Before couple of days i did create a Flex and JSON portlet, that portlet is a simple portlet which sends list of contacts to flex in JSON format and then flex is displaying that data in the Grid format then i changed it so that Flex UI converts the data submitted by user in the JSON string format and submit it to portlet, the portlet is responsible for parsing JSON back to Java Object and inserting it into database.

Today i made some changes in the portlet so that portlet reads list of contacts from database, converts it into XML and sends it to Flex object and then Flex is displaying it like this using DataGrid. YOu can also insert new record in Contact table, when you do that i am passing values submitted by user separately as POST parameters

• Sample Portlet


• Sample MXML

The server side code for this portlet is almost same as that of Flex and JSON portlet, with difference that i am using Xstream for converting Contact Java object into XML like this

public static String convertJavaToXML(ContactDTO contactDto){
  XStream xstream = new XStream(new DomDriver());
  xstream.setMode(XStream.NO_REFERENCES);
  xstream.alias("contactDTO",ContactDTO.class);
  xstream.alias("contact", Contact.class);

  String xmlString = xstream.toXML(contactDto); 

  return xmlString ;
}

The client side flex code is almost same, only thing that i had to change is the method that handles response of resourceURL and converts it into dataprovider for the DataGrid like this

public function httpResult(event:ResultEvent):void {
  trace("Entering httpResult");
  var result:Object = event.result;
  trace(" Response in string" + event.result.toString());
  var xmlData:Object =new XML(event.result.toString());
  nextActionURL = xmlData.actionURL;
  var xmlListColl:XMLListCollection = new  XMLListCollection(xmlData.contactList.children());
  trace("After creating xmlListCollection " + xmlListColl);
  dgEmployees.dataProvider = xmlListColl;
  trace("Entering httpResult");
}

The XML object which is part of default package in Flex takes XML string as input and converts it into flex object. This is the response returned by portlet

<contactDTO>
  <actionURL>/pluto/portal/Sunils Test Page/__acXMLContactPortlet0x2XMLContactPortlet!-318001599%7C0/__pmXMLContactPortlet0x2XMLContactPortlet!-318001599%7C0_view/__wsXMLContactPortlet0x2XMLContactPortlet!-318001599%7C0_normal?</actionURL>
  <contactList>
    <contact>
      <firstName>Jiya</firstName>
      <lastName>Patil</lastName>
      <email>jiya@gmail.com</email>
    </contact>
</contactDTO>

After converting this object into Flex you can access elements as properties of flex object Ex. you can access values of actionURL element using xmlData.actionURL.

In order to display contacts in DataGrid first i am creating a XMLListCollection object like this XMLListCollection(xmlData.contactList.children()) then setting it as value of dataProvider for the DataGrid