Flex: DataGrid and the Command Pattern

Question

I am using a command pattern, so any changes to object state need to happen within a command execution. A normal itemeditor in a DataGrid would just make its changes on the underlying bound object, but I need to intercept that change and make it use a command.

I'm pretty new to flex, so I'm looking for ideas of how to implement this. A basic example is that I have an object with a "date" field. In the datagrid I am using a flex "DateField" component as the itemeditor. When I select a new date, I don't want it to update the datasource, I want it to call a different method where I can access the newly selected value and pass it to a command to execute. Any tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Use the itemEditBegin and/or itemEditEnd events on the DataGrid and build your command in the handler. This page has a few examples of capturing the edit operation with those events.

Answer 2

In my opinion, you're over-engineering this to hell, to the point that it becomes unusable. Why would you need a command to just change data on the fly? I've been doing Flex for 3 years and I yet to see it done this way. The only time commands are used is for receiving information from the server.

Either way, if you really want to implement it (against my recommendation), you would probably want to do event bubbling with a controller listening higher up the display list for the event, then from there trigger a command. From within the item renderer:

this.dispatchEvent(new Event('someEvent', true));

And then higher up the display list:

dataGrid.addEventListener('someEvent', someEventHandler);

And within the handler you can run the command.