Flex and SOAP

Its always fun to work with Web service in Flex. Those pesky headers! Found a couple of terrific links on the subject. Now its easy :-)
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/showthread.php3?t=195916&highlight=e4x+faq
http://craigkaminsky.blogspot.com/2009/05/flex-3-make-net-namespaces-in-soap-xml.html

Just to put some code behind this....

Here is part of the feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="yes" ?>
<feed xml:base="http://www.placespr.com/WebDataService1.svc/" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices" xmlns:m="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/metadata" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<title type="text">ptg_categories</title>
<id>http://www.placespr.com/webdataservice1.svc/ptg_categories</id>
<updated>2009-11-22T15:26:36Z</updated>
<link rel="self" title="ptg_categories" href="ptg_categories" />
<entry>
<id>http://www.placespr.com/WebDataService1.svc/ptg_categories(1)</id>
<title type="text" />
<updated>2009-11-22T15:26:36Z</updated>
<author>
<name />
</author>
<link rel="edit" title="ptg_categories" href="ptg_categories(1)" />
<category term="ponce_1000Model.ptg_categories" scheme="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ado/2007/08/dataservices/scheme" />
<content type="application/xml">
<m:properties>
<d:cat_id m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:cat_id>
<d:name m:null="true" />
<d:service>hotels.asmx</d:service>
<d:icon>/images/icons/hotels.gif</d:icon>
<d:ordering m:type="Edm.Int32">1</d:ordering>
<d:counting m:type="Edm.Int32">75</d:counting>
</m:properties>
</content>
</entry>
......


and here is the modified code from these excellent links:

private function getCategoriesResult(evt:ResultEvent):void {
var respXML:XML = evt.result as XML;

var xmlSource:String = respXML.toXMLString();
//Strip off the headers
xmlSource = xmlSource.replace(/<[^!?]?[^>]+?>/g, removeNamspaces); // will invoke the function detailed below
var cleanXML:XML = XML(xmlSource);
for each( var item:XML in cleanXML.entry ) // looping over the reportHistory elements to act on them
{
trace( "name: " + item.content.properties.service);
}
}

// Web service response cleaner function
private function removeNamspaces(...rest):String
{
rest[0] = rest[0].replace(/xmlns[^"]+\"[^"]+\"/g, "");
var attrs:Array = rest[0].match(/\"[^"]*\"/g);
rest[0] = rest[0].replace(/\"[^"]*\"/g, "%attribute value%");
rest[0] = rest[0].replace(/(<\/?|\s)\w+\:/g, "$1");
while (rest[0].indexOf("%attribute value%") > 0)
{
rest[0] = rest[0].replace("%attribute value%", attrs.shift());
}
return rest[0];
}

IE8 Vista Problem

I'll not br rotten about Microsoft, since I develop on Windows .. but sometimes!!

I found I could not open IE, out of the blue. Spent a frustrating couple of hours troubleshooting. All to do with security updates and IE settins. The solution which worked of me is as follows:

Open internet explorer and go to menu TOOLS, than to INTERNET OPTIONS. Open the CONNECTION tab,and click on SETTINGS. You then uncheck the 'use of proxy server for this connection' and click ok .

AlivePDF

Its been a hectic time with project work. Much to share particularly with regards the ArcGIS Flex API and the open source OpenScales Flex library.

Just a quick mention today on AlivePDF. Historically, I've had to generate PDF's in PHP. AlivePDF is based on the PHP library FPDF. It makes generating PDF's from Flex very straighforward. Alex Britez has written a simple example here.