Brian Kotek:
Inversion of Control

Like most of you, I sit in front of a computer for a large part of my day. Over time, sitting and working on the computer has caused me varying physical issues, like back, wrist, and elbow pain. To alleviate this, I bought a desk with an adjustable height, an ergonomic keyboard, and an Aeron chair. These have helped greatly. But the one issue that kept coming back was wrist pain. I tried several types of mice, with varying shapes, but none of them dealt completely with the issue. For me, a big part of the discomfort in my hand and elbow came from constantly reaching over for the mouse, as well as gripping it. It might sound silly to some, but when you do this thousands of times, it adds up!

Then, about six months ago, I found a blurb about the RollerMouse Free on some tech site. Having used it daily for a while, I can say that this mouse is an excellent option to a traditional mouse.

The RollerMouse sits directly under your keyboard, just past the space bar. To control the cursor, you roll a bar up, down, and side to side. It sounds bizarre, but it works very nicely and was easy to get used to. The bar moves very smoothly, and is very accurate. You can easily move it with your thumbs, and you barely have to move your hands off the keyboard, or you can use your fingertips. Either way, it's far better than reaching over for a normal mouse.

I still keep a regular mouse as well, but I use it pretty infrequently (except for gaming!). This odd new RollerMouse is the workhorse now. I just wanted to mention this device in case anyone else has similar problems and was frustrated trying to solve them. I was uncertain about how this thing would work out, but it really does work well. There's a video at the product web site which shows how it works in more detail, if you're interested to see it in action.

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I've uploaded my CFinNC presentations to SlideSix for anyone who's interested:

Object-Oriented Design Principles

Introduction to Swiz

Overall, CFinNC was great. I actually had to work for a large chunk of the weekend so aside from presenting and mingling with folks later in the evening, I didn't get to attend many other sessions. That said, everything looked top-notch while I was there. The conference unfolded very smoothly and all of the attendees seemed very engaged. Hats off to Dan Wilson and the entire volunteer team for pulling this off! This conference definitely held its own against the other CF conferences I've attended. It was very difficult to tell that it was completely free. Hopefully we can do it again next year!

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One Flex limitation I've had to work around for a long time is the need for having a complex property name as the dataField for a DataGridColumn, like this:

<mx:DataGridColumn headerText="Client" dataField="client.name" />
		

I had written a nice, generic, custom labelFunction as well as a custom NestedPropertyDataGridColumn to handle this, and it all seemed to work well.

I just discovered that the Flex team had addressed this in the Flex 3.4 SDK update, though I don't think you'd ever know it since I couldn't find any actual note that this was added. The only reason I discovered this was actually looking at the source code, and then finding this ticket in the Flex issue tracker.

So yay, we can use complex properties in our DataGridColumns now! Except...it's broken.

Ugh. Really, guys on the Flex team? This was added and no one ever bothered to click on the column to sort it? Hmph.

Anyway, as one workaround, you can use a custom DataGridColumn combined with a custom Sort to get proper sorting in most cases:

package com.briankotek.util.datagrid
{

import mx.collections.ListCollectionView;
import mx.controls.DataGrid;
import mx.controls.dataGridClasses.DataGridColumn;
import mx.core.mx_internal;
use namespace mx_internal;

/**
 * A custom DataGridColumn that supports sorting a column that has a nested child property path for the dataField value.
 */
public class DataGridColumnNested extends DataGridColumn
{
	public function DataGridColumnNested( columnName : String = null )
	{
		super( columnName );
	}

	/**
	 * Override itemToLabel to force a ComparableSort custom sort class onto the parent DataGrid dataProvider.
	 * This works around a bug in sorting columns with complex property names in the dataField value.
	 * @param data
	 * @return
	 */
	override public function itemToLabel( data : Object ) : String
	{
		var parent : DataGrid;
		if( owner && owner is DataGrid )
		{
			parent = owner as DataGrid;

			if( hasComplexFieldName && parent && parent.sortableColumns && parent.dataProvider is ListCollectionView &&
				(
					!( ListCollectionView( parent.dataProvider ).sort ) ||
					!( ListCollectionView( parent.dataProvider ).sort is ComparableSort )
				)
			  )
			{
				ListCollectionView( parent.dataProvider ).sort = new ComparableSort();
			}
		}
		return super.itemToLabel( data );
	}

}
}
		

package com.briankotek.util.datagrid
{
import mx.collections.Sort;
import mx.collections.SortField;

/**
 * Custom Sort class that forces the correct compareFunction for a given field to be used.
 */
public class ComparableSort extends Sort
{
	public function ComparableSort()
	{
		super();
	}

	override public function findItem( items:Array, values:Object, mode:String, returnInsertionIndex:Boolean = false, compareFunction:Function = null ):int
	{
		if( !compareFunction && fields && fields.length && fields[0] is SortField && SortField( fields[0] ).compareFunction )
		{
			compareFunction = SortField( fields[0] ).compareFunction;
		}
		return super.findItem( items, values, mode, returnInsertionIndex, compareFunction );
	}
}
}
		

This forces the custom Sort class onto the grid's dataProvider, and then forces the correct compareFunction from the SortField to be used by the Sort's findItem() method. Hopefully we'll get a fix for this soon, but in the meantime, maybe this workaround will help out some other folks.

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I'm happy to say I'll be participating in the CFPanel Podcast on September 8 at 8 PM EST. We'll be discussing ColdFusion and Java integration. I hope to add some helpful substance to the conversation, but I'm really looking forward to hearing what Mark (who created JavaLoader) and Barney (who created CFGroovy) have to say.

Listen in if you can, or check out the Connect recording afterwards. Thanks!

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Hal Helms, Ben Nadel and I recorded a conversation over the weekend on the subject of OO in CF. I'm supporting the position that OO is still a good thing in CF, Hal disagrees, and Ben is undecided. As you might expect, Hal is left a trembling husk as the weight of my arguments unmercifully crushes him. You know those scenes in superhero movies where someone gets punched so hard they end up in a crater in the ground? It's like that. Only worse.

In all seriousness though, it was a very fun talk and I think there are some solid points made from all involved, but I'll let you, gentle reader, be the judge. You can download the recording here.

In the interest of keeping any discussion on this topic from fragmenting, we've decided to disable comments on our respective blog entries and instead created a Google Group to act as a central sounding board. Hopefully this isn't too inconvenient, I realize it's something of a departure from the norm, but let's see how that works.

I'm not sure yet whether this will turn into any kind of regular discussion, but I suppose it could. We'll just have to see what folks think! Thanks.

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