Data Provider Controls in Flex

All list based controls and many of the Flex framework controls are called data provider controls since they represent data from a data provider.

Data Provider Controls in Flex

Data Provider Controls in Flex

     

All list based controls and many of the Flex framework controls are called data provider controls since they represent data from a data provider.
All data provider controls consist of one common property dataprovider that populates data from an ArrayCollection object, an XMLListCollection object or a custom collection.

  Data provider control requires data for display or user interaction. This data comes from ArrayCollection, XMLListCollection and custom collections. Instead of these collection you can also use the raw objects such as an Array of strings or objects are wrapped in collections when ever you use it as the value of the data provider property. In few circumstances raw objects are not much effective like :

  1. Raw objects are not well for those condition where the data changes frequently. Since the dataprovider does not have notification about the data changes into the base objects. The components are not updated until they are not reloaded.

  2. These objects does not provide functionality of data accessing, sorting, filtering and other collection functionalities.

Here is the list of some controls that are having the "dataprovider" property:

  • List control
  • HorizontalList control
  • TileList control
  • DataGrid control
  • Tree control
  • ComboBox control
  • Menu control
  • MenuBar control
  • Button Bar control
  • Color Picker control

  

Tutorials

  1. Data Provider
  2. Data Provider Controls in Flex
  3. List Control with Data Provider
  4. HorizontalList Control with Data Provider
  5. TileList Control with Data Provider