If you asked me to evaluate my knowledge of Flex / ActionScript I am not sure what I would say. I don't use them enough to say either way but I think at this point I understand programming enough to get around any language. RocketFM is my file manager application that I started a couple months ago and has turned into a great project. I found a strange bug and It was nothing I have seen before so I was not quite sure where to begin. First let's take a look at the issue and then we can walk through the path to the answer.

If you take a look at the video below you can see the bug. When you open a folder pay attention to the number and then watch as I scroll all the way down and then all the way back up. When you get back to the top the wrong folder is open / selected.

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This entry was posted on April 16, 2009 at 8:04 PM and has received 2616 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

Someone emailed me about porting my RocketFM application over to another language such as Java/Groovy. I am unable to locate that email so please contact me if you are reading this. Thinking about that brought up some interesting questions for me that I would love some thoughts on. Right now I just have a single project that is hosted over at RIAForge. How can I create a new project based off of this. While most of the changes are back end I think there needs to be a few changes in a couple places and I am not quite sure how to make these changes available to others. Do I treat it as a totally new project? Any ideas would be great, thanks!

This entry was posted on March 16, 2009 at 12:16 PM and has received 1803 views. Comments 5 | Print this entry.

Today I thought I would walk you through 2 features I pushed into the repository last night. The first is the ability to download an entire directory by right clicking on it. The other was a naming issue with the zip file download so we are going to change how that works.

We will start with the ability to download an entire directory. Right now if you clicked on a directory and selected every single file in the directory you are essentially downloading that directory. The selected files are passed to a download method and if its more than one we pass an array of file paths to our download zip method. What we want to do is add a right clicking menu to our tree to download directory menu item. To do that we are going to update our Tree Item Renderer (com.rocketfm.customTreeItemRenderer). The only addition is the new download menu item and when its clicked we are going to dispatch a custom event named download directory that will pass the data for that tree item with it. package com.rocketfm { import events.DownloadDirectoryEvent; import flash.display.DisplayObject; import flash.events.ContextMenuEvent; import flash.ui.ContextMenu; import flash.ui.ContextMenuItem; import mx.collections.*; import mx.controls.Alert; import mx.controls.treeClasses.*; import mx.core.Application; import mx.managers.PopUpManager; import views.AddDirectory; import views.DeleteDirectory; import views.RenameDirectory; public class CustomTreeItemRenderer extends TreeItemRenderer { private var renameWin:RenameDirectory; private var addWin:AddDirectory; private var delWin:DeleteDirectory; private var baseDir:String; public function CustomTreeItemRenderer() { super(); var menu:ContextMenu = new ContextMenu(); var add:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("Add Folder"); var remove:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("Remove Folder"); var rename:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("Rename Folder"); var download:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem("Download Directory"); add.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT,addDirectory); remove.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT,removeDirectory); rename.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT,renameDirectory); download.addEventListener(ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT,downloadAll); menu.hideBuiltInItems(); menu.customItems.push(add); menu.customItems.push(remove); menu.customItems.push(rename); menu.customItems.push(download); this.baseDir = Application.application.baseDir; this.contextMenu = menu; } private function addDirectory(event:ContextMenuEvent):void { addWin = new AddDirectory(); addWin.dirPath = data.path; addWin.parentPath = data.parent; addWin.item = data; // add window PopUpManager.addPopUp(addWin,DisplayObject(Application.application),true); } private function removeDirectory(event:ContextMenuEvent):void { if(data.path != baseDir){ delWin = new DeleteDirectory(); delWin.item = data; // delete window PopUpManager.addPopUp(delWin,DisplayObject(Application.application),true); } else { Alert.show("You do not have permission to delete the base directory","Remove Error"); } } private function renameDirectory(event:ContextMenuEvent):void { if(data.path != baseDir){ renameWin = new RenameDirectory(); renameWin.item = data; renameWin.oldDirectoryName = data.name; renameWin.parentPath = data.parent; // rename window PopUpManager.addPopUp(renameWin,DisplayObject(Application.application),true); } else { Alert.show("You do not have permission to rename the base directory","Rename Error"); } } private function downloadAll(event:ContextMenuEvent):void { dispatchEvent(new DownloadDirectoryEvent("downloadDirectory",data)); } } }

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This entry was posted on January 13, 2009 at 9:48 AM and has received 2366 views. Comments 0 | Print this entry.

Working through some bugs and upgrades to my RocketFM application I came across a pretty inter sting problem. I was trying to rename a directory from dan to DAN. It is the same directory but the file sytem is case sensitive so this should work right? Wrong! If you try and do this using cfdirectory you will get the following error.

The specified newdirectory attribute value is invalid.
c:\DAN already exists and cannot be overwritten. The exception occurred during a cfdirectory action="rename".

This is because of the fact that ColdFusion does not care about case. This was a bummer for me because users in the end will come back with I am unable to rename this directory and explaining the nature of case sensitivity is not really an answer. Lucky for me I always have a beast in the bullpen (Java) so this should be a pretty easy fix. This is the old rename directory method in my File manager component. <cffunction name="renameDirectory" access="remote" output="false" returntype="void"> <cfargument name="oldDir" type="string" required="true"/> <cfargument name="newDir" type="string" required="true"/> <cfdirectory action="rename" directory="#arguments.oldDir#" newdirectory="#arguments.newDir#"/> </cffunction> To make sure we allow for case sensitive changes we can simply change our code to the following. <cffunction name="renameDirectory" access="remote" output="false" returntype="void"> <cfargument name="oldDir" type="string" required="true"/> <cfargument name="newDir" type="string" required="true"/> <cfscript> var src = createObject("java","java.io.File").init(trim(arguments.oldDir)); var dest = createObject("java","java.io.File").init(trim(arguments.newDir)); src.renameTo(dest); </cfscript> </cffunction>

This entry was posted on January 12, 2009 at 4:35 PM and has received 3482 views. Comments 2 | Print this entry.

This will be the last post in this series. While I will continue to add features to this project and share the details with you, I wanted to find a clear line where I could close this series. The last feature is probably the most important. What good is a file manager if you can't upload new files. This post will cover the upload component.

First we are going to create a new file components/RocketUploader. The component we are creating is going to be based on a Title Window because we are going to launch the uploader as a popup from our application. The layout of the component is pretty simple. I know we talked about layouts at the beginning of this series and I am doing the exact opposite of what I preached but I just like the look and feel of the panel component here. In the panel we have some buttons, a data grid to display the files and progress bar to show file upload progress. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <mx:TitleWindow xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" creationComplete="init()" showCloseButton="true"> <mx:Panel id="container" title="{titleBarText}" width="100%" height="100%" titleIcon="@Embed('assets/images/image.png')" backgroundColor="#f2f2f2"> <mx:HBox width="100%" backgroundAlpha="0.0"> <mx:Button id="btnBrowse" label="Browse" click="onBrowse(event)" icon="@Embed('assets/images/add.png')"/> <mx:Button id="btnRemove" label="Remove" click="onRemove(event)" icon="@Embed('assets/images/delete.png')" enabled="{dgFiles.selectedIndex > -1}"/> <mx:Spacer width="100%"/> <mx:Button id="btnUpload" label="Upload" click="onUpload(event)" icon="@Embed('assets/images/image_add.png')" enabled="{_files.length > 0}"/> </mx:HBox> <mx:DataGrid id="dgFiles" width="100%" height="100%" dataProvider="{_files}" allowMultipleSelection="true"> <mx:columns> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="File Name" dataField="name"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="File Type" dataField="type"/> <mx:DataGridColumn headerText="File Size" dataField="size" labelFunction="bytesToKilobytes"/> </mx:columns> </mx:DataGrid> <mx:ControlBar> <mx:Label id="txtStatus" text="{statusBarText}" width="200"/> <mx:ProgressBar id="uploadProgressBar" width="100%" labelPlacement="center" trackHeight="20" mode="manual" enabled="{_files.length > 0}" label="{progressBarText}" color="#3B6BBF"/> </mx:ControlBar> </mx:Panel> </mx:TitleWindow>

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This entry was posted on January 11, 2009 at 10:11 PM and has received 4441 views. Comments 8 | Print this entry.