Lesson 20. Pushing Data with Adobe Flex Data Services

What You Will Learn

In this lesson, you will:

• Learn more about the Flex Message Service (FMS)

• Configure Flex Builder to run your application through Flex Data Services (FDS)

• Configure the FMS destination

• Use the <mx:Consumer> tag

• Push data from an application server to the Flex client

Approximate Time

This lesson takes approximately 2 hours to complete.

Lesson Files

Media Files:

Lesson20/assets/typeSalesGateway.xml

Starting Files:

Lesson20/start/Dashboard.mxml

Lesson20/start/EComm.mxml

Lesson20/start/views/ecomm/Checkout.mxml

Completed Files:

Lesson20/complete/Dashboard.mxml

Lesson20/complete/EComm.mxml

Lesson20/complete/views/ecomm/Checkout.mxml

In the last lessons, you got an overview of the features available from Flex Data Services (FDS) and learned how FDS can be used with your Flex applications to provide greater functionality. In this lesson, you will explore how a Flex application can register itself as a listener for new data pushed from the server, which makes it possible to have the server asynchronously send updates to the clients. You will use this to automatically update the Dashboard charts to reflect new sales in real time!

When a user completes an order, the Application server sends a gateway message to the FDS server, which sends an update to the Dashboard application in real time. The charts are updated to always display current information.