Question

I’m currently building an application that is presenting tabular (fetched from a webservice) data and have squirted it into a datagrid – seemed the most obvious way to present it on screen.

I’ve now come across a few limitations in the datagrid and wonder how I might move forward. As a relative newcomer to flex development I’m a little lost.

A few things I am wanting to do.

1. The data is logically split into groups and I would like to be able to have subheadings in the grid whenever I move to a new group.
2. I would like to be able to highligh individual cells based on their content relative to other values in the row – ie highlight the cell with the highest value in the row.

Is this possible with the standard datagrid?

I’m actually using the try-before-you-buy version of flex builder at the moment but I have ordered Flex Builder 3 Pro – which is on its way to me. I understand there is an ‘advanced datagrid’ control in this version – perhaps that will support some of what I wish to do?

Alternatively – is there another way of building custom tabular data?

Answer 1

The DataGrid is the best bet for that, but also check out the AdvancedDataGrid (here are some AdvancedDataGrid Demos with Source from FarataSystems).

_{(source: flexicious.com)}

Both the DataGrid and AdvancedDataGrid are notoriously hard to customize, and everything you’d like to do is pretty advanced, so it will take a while to get going, but you can do it eventually.

There’s no other way to build tabular data unless you start doing some advanced things with some of the data visualization libraries out there.

Good luck,
Lance