A few days ago I started building an app I’ve had in my head for awhile now. I wanted to see if I could throw my current Flex skills and personal situation (wedding planning) at Intuit’s new cloud computing platform. I read up on IPP docs for awhile, downloaded all the tools, and then embarked on creating a test app (just crudding a name, date, and combobox selection) which took me all night and left me a little less enthusiastic. But my heartache is your benefit, as I now have a useful tip.
The interesting thing about IPP is that you make your database first (online at workplace.intuit.com) before generating all your ORM/transport code in Flex Builder. Even more interesting: the workplace schema generation process has no guardrails. You can make fundamental choices (not mistakes, but choices) that will simply not allow your generated code to work.
So here’s the tip: do not name any fields in a table the same as a data type (especially built-in data type) in Flex. My fatal problem in building the test app is that I named the date field ‘date’. When the code was generated I got lots of (initially very confusing) compile errors:
Huh? Date is a built-in type, how is it not found? Ahh, the class now defines a property called Date, which returns a type called Date. Problem solved… eventually. I went back to workplace and changed the field name to MyDate, and resynced the code generator with the new schema. After that my app built, and I was able to continue developing.
Also, Cairngorm for small projects is like stuffing an aircraft carrier into a swiss army knife.
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