As with any development team, we are constantly looking for better tools to do our jobs. Personally, I have messed with Flex for a while but never really had the inspiration to create anything with it. That changed recently when we began development on a new e-commerce platform for Jacobson Floral a national floral goods wholesaler. One of the items we were tasked with from an administrative standpoint was an online product management system to enable management of their 20,000+ product catalog which is fed from their internal accounting software package. A typical product management setup may contain ways to browse products, perhaps search them and if we’re feeling really generous, sorting and pagination…This in my opinion can be one of the least fun aspects of a project.

In comes the Flex framework.

For those that don’t know, Flex is an open source framework for building web applications.

While messing with the Tour de Flex app, I stumbled across the DataGrid component. I was immediately drawn to the features of the DataGrid component as it fulfills many of the needs for building the very thing we were tasked with building. The only reservation that we had was how the component would be able to handle over 23,000 product entries from an XML data source. Without testing, I was pretty skeptical that it was going to be a viable solution. After optimizing our feed to ensure it builds as quickly as possible, I was instantly surprised at how quickly the rows were rendered within the grid as well as how quickly we were able to sort within the grid. After doing some more playing, I ended up with a very simple regular expression search to filter results within the grid. To take it a step further, it was decided to further pear down how this data is presented by splitting it into multiple feeds as opposed to just one. This meant working with the tab navigation component.

The end result was multiple datagrids with data from different feeds and ultimately a reusable asset for future projects. Most immediate of which is an administrative backend for New Balance. As simple as it was to build, it illustrated to us some of the more practical uses for Flex and a perfect solution for management of large amounts of varied data.