Flex 4 data management - how do I approach this?

Question

Hi guys, quite an explanation here, hope someone has the patience to read it through

I'm building an application in Flex 4 that handles an ordering system. I have a small mySql database and I've written a few services in php to handle the database.

Basically the logic goes like this:

I have tables for customers, products, productGroups, orders, and orderContent

I have no problem with the CRUD management of the products, orders and customers, it is the order submission that the customer will fill in that is giving me headaches:

What I want is to display the products in dataGrids, ordered by group, which will be populated with Flex datamanagement via the php-services, and that per se is no problem. But I also want an extra column in the datagrid that the user can fill in with the amount he wishes to order of that product. This column would in theory then bind to the db table "orderContent" via the php services.

The problem is that you would need to create a new order in the database first that the data could bind to (orderContent is linked to an order in the db).

I do not want to create a new order every time a user enters the page to look at the products, rather I would like to create the order when a button is pressed and then take everything from the datagrids on the page and submit it into the database.

My idea has been to create a separate one-column datagrid, line it up next to the datagrid that contains the products and in that datagrid the user would be able to enter the amount of that product he'd like to order.

I've created a valueObject that contains the data I would need for an order:

Code:

package valueObjects
{
  public class OrderAmount
  {

    public var productId:int;
    public var productAmount:int;
    public var productPrice:Number;

    public function orderAmount()
    {
    }
  }
}

My idea was to use a service to get all products from a certain group, populate an ArrayCollection with the data, then transfer each object in that ArrayCollection to an instance of the Value Object above, add the value object to another ArrayCollection that would the be used as a dataProvider for the one-column datagrid (I would only display amount which would be set to zero at first, but use the other data upon transfering it to the db)

I've tried to use the results from the automatically generated serviceResults that retrieve the products for the datagrid and put in a resultHandler that transfers the valueobjects, however this does not seem to work.

Basically my question is this: Am I approaching this thing completely wrong, or is there a way I can get it to work the way I planned?

Would I need to create a completely new service request to get the product id:s, and price to populate the one-column datagrid.

I'll post some code if that would help.

Thank you if you read this far.

Answer 1

Solved it by creating a Value Object class to hold all the info needed for each row in the grid and from the php service that returned all products in a group, I looped through the result and transfered the data needed into my Value Object.

I then added each Value Object into an ArrayCollection and made that the dataProvider for the dataGrid.

No need to use two grids. I forgot how logic things get when you think of datagrid data just as an ArrayCollection and forget the visual presentation of it on screen.

Put in a few itemRenderers and the whole thing is beautiful!