I've spent a bit of time recently working on a flash based reporting website. The project is all pretty standard architecture for a flash website, but there has been a persistent issue about loading times and poor user experience.

After having a bit of digging around behind the scenes it appeared as though the flash SWF file was streaming a configuration XML file in the background. This isn't a great idea at the best of times but in this case the file was 147k lines long and weighed in at 22.5mb. So this accounted for a stack of loading time when the flash app loads up.

After downloading the XML file and browsing through it in Eclipse my first impression is that there was a ton of whitespace in it. After running a quick 'find and replace' on any double space characters (to avoid removing spaces in legitimate text strings) and re-saving the file was down to 3.2mb.

So let this be a warning to anyone loading up machine-to-machine text files. Squeeze them down, don't include whitespace, your Apps don't care about it, the file doesn't need to be human readable, all you are doing is using up network bandwidth.

I won't even get into the risks involved in allowing your config files to be downloaded by people here, that's a whole different issue!

I was sure I had done this before, somewhere but I couldn't find the code anywhere. So I've knocked together a really quick and simple example.

I want to be able to open a new site in a pop up from an AIR application. To do this I need to use the 'urlRequest' function to create a url request. Then insert that into a 'navigateToURL' method, specifying that you want a new window '_new'.

Here is the complete example.

Works like this.

View demo.

Whilst developing a new Flex shopping cart I came across an issue in dealing with the formatting of currencies for the payment system. The previous version of the shopping cart had preformatted values stored in the actual database, so I was simply displaying them in the Flex front end.

In this version there is the specific requirement that it is able to handle a multi currency configuration. So I thought I'd dig out the documentation on the Flex currency Formatter.

Firstly create a CurrencyFormatter object, and specify the currency symbol, and any other formatting parameters that you require.

Next create a NumberValidator, as this will validate our entered value as a numeric value, we don't need to try and re-format alpha numeric values.

Then create a form to run the test validation against. I often find it easier to build a test mechanism at the same time. Below is a simple submission form, in the form we just enter the value, click the Button, which fires the Format() function.

The Format() function checks that the value is numeric, and applies the CurrencyFormatter object to the value. Then we simply assign the newly formatted value back to our Text field in the form.