Something Wrong with the System

A Flash/Actionscript blog

Making AS3 components is harder than I’d imagined…

UPDATE
I’ve updated the Flash Pie Chart, made it more awesome and put it up for sale on ActiveDen as a Flash component and Flex Class!
Check it out! It’s pretty rad!

So as I wrote earlier I’m working on transforming my 3D Pie Chart into a proper AS3 component.  Holy crap, it’s harder than I thought!

By far the most useful resource I’ve found is this one written by Jeff Kamerer from Adobe.  The document is divided into 9 parts (it’s a small book!) and covers:

I’ve trudged my way through the first 3 parts and… GREAT SUCCESS!  I’ve got my Pie Chart publishing from a component inspector window (shown on the left).

The bit of code that caused me the most grief is the section that pertains to the dataProvider.  It seems that if I want custom parameters in my Component Inspector I need to create my own DataProvider classes.

[Collection(collectionClass="ca.organa.Data.Collect", collectionItem="ca.organa.Data.ComponentInfo", identifier="sliceLabel", name="Pie Chart Data")]
 public function set dataProvider(value:Collection):void {
 if (_dataProvider != null) {
  _dataProvider.removeEventListener(DataChangeEvent.DATA_CHANGE, handleDataChange);
 }
  _dataProvider = value;
  _dataProvider.addEventListener(DataChangeEvent.DATA_CHANGE, handleDataChange, false, 0, true);
  invalidate();
 }

Jeff covers the topic here.

I’ll post about components again once I’ve gone further into this stuff.  My next challenges are going to be getting live preview working, and getting a proper colour picker in the component inspector (is that even possible?). Read the rest of this entry »

September 8th, 2009 by Peter Organa
Posted in AS3, Flash Components, Programming, Source Code | Comments Off on Making AS3 components is harder than I’d imagined…

My AS3 3D Pie Chart

UPDATE
I’ve updated the Flash Pie Chart, made it more awesome and put it up for sale on ActiveDen as a Flash component and Flex Class!
Check it out! It’s pretty rad!

First an FYI, this is a showing off post.  I’m not sharing the source for this as I’d like to explore the idea of selling the Pie Chart as a Flash Component.

Recently at work I’ve been doing on a bunch of charts (mostly analytics style lines graphs).  When I was finished, I thought to myself: “Well I haven’t done a Pie Chart yet”.
Ultimately, it took me 5 times longer than I would have ever expected, but I did create a fully functional 3D Pie Chart!

  • This is a true 3D Pie Chart with rotation.
  • This is done completely with Flash’s draw API, I don’t make use of Flash10 3D features or Papervision
  • The Pie chart is resizable and all the data/colours are externally configuarable.  You can even change the view angle.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 4th, 2009 by Peter Organa