Flash MX2 Tools: Data Debugging behavior

If you are working with the new Data Architecture, you will often find it handy when you have some sort of live debugging available, to see what data is send and received. With Flash Remoting, you had the NetConnection debugger, which gave you detailed information on the requests send and received. In Flash MX 2004, you now have a new method available which sort of will do the same. In the documentation you will find how to enable this method by inserting this line of code:

_global.__dataLogger = new mx.data.binding.Log();

I created this behavior, so that you can continue working on your application and switching debugging on and of by simply inserting this behavior through the Behaviors panel. You will need the new Extension Manager that supports the MX 2004 Studio.

Download the Data Debugging behavior ( *.mxp )

If you want to find out how i created this behavior, read on.

Basically, behaviors in Flash MX 2004 Profesional are possible because of the new Extensibility layer. This brought us features like the Javascript API, custom tools, the XML-2-UI interface and behaviors. Expect some pretty cool stuff from developers and other companies in the near future.

Behaviors are located in [FLASH2004]\en\Configuration\Behaviors where [FLASH2004] is your Flash folder under your useracount. These are actually plain XML files, with three important nodes:

- <flash_behavior version="1.0">
This is the root node, every behavior starts with this.

- <behavior_definition>
This describes the name of your behavior, the category under which it is accessible through the Behaviors panel and a reference to the dialog node

- <dialog>
This node can have childnodes which are actually part of the XML User Interface Language or XUL. Flash MX2 supports a subset of XUL. You can find more information about XUL at www.xulplanet.com.

- <actionscript>
This CDATA node contains the actual Actionscript that is gonna be included when you run the behavior.

If you have a behavior file and you want to distribute it, you can wrap it up in a Macromedia Extension Package ( MXP ). There is an excellent application available called MXI File Creator, made by Muzak, which will help you create your Macromedia Extension files ( MXI ). From these files you can 'compile' them into a MXP file with the Extension Manager. Unfortunately, MXI File Creator isn't updated to the latest specs, so you have to manually edit the MXI files. The specifications can be found on the Macromedia website.

Comments

[aral]

Nice one, Owen! :)

[数据恢复]

Nice one, Owen! :)