Daemonite: FLEXible FlashPaper: Part One Archive

The first part of a series building FlashPaper into your Flex application. We find it tremendously useful for large printable docs, reports and the like to keep the document inline and not force the user to pop up a separate window just to print.

With the release of CFMX7 we do have the posibility to generate "FlashPaper". FlashPaper are very similar to Flash movies as we all know them. FlashPaper can be generated either by <cfdocument> or <cfreport> tags.

The example uses flashpaper in 3 different ways:

• static call (flashpaper already exists on the server)
• cfdocument call: flashpaper will be generated on the fly using cfdocument
• cfreport call: flashpaper will be generated on the fly as well but using a cfr (cf report) template

Download file

Prerequisites:

1. download: flashpaper_1.zip
2. place flash_paper.mxml under your flex server root (or any directory below root)
3. on your CF server create the following folder structure:
   {your_coldfusion_server_path}/posting/1/
4. extract the files: cfdocument_example.cfm, cfreport_example.cfm, sample.cfr, guidelines.swf to the just created directory.
5. Apply changes to the 'contentPath' variable in your flashpaper_part1.mxml to match your server settings.
6. My CFServer runs under port 8300. Run flashpaper_part1.mxml

That should be it.

To get more functionallity and customization happening on the FlashPaperLoader object please have either a look at the mx.controls.Loader class and its parent classes. you can extend that class and name it something like 'FlashPaperLoader.as' or go to MM website and search for ‘FlashPaper API’. Some documentation can be found. Don’t get mixed up with the articles ‘Flash and FlashPaper’ ;-) similar but different.

Later we’ll look at secure FlashPaper generation passing user credentials to RemoteObjects for the purpose of FlashPaper Generation.

josef

Posted by josef at 05:07 PM | Permalink
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