MACROMEDIA FLASH 8-FLASH, Use Manual

Page: 432 / 678

432 Data Integration (Flash Professional Only)
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Data type: Every field has a data type, which is selected from a list of available data types.
The data type of a field affects data binding in two ways: When a new value is assigned to
a field through data binding, the data type determines the rules that are used to check the
data for validity. When you bind between fields that have different data types, the data
binding feature attempts to convert the data appropriately. For more information, see
“Schema data types” on page 442 .
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Storage type: Every field has a storage type. Typically, it defaults to one of four values
based on the data type of a field. The available values for storage types are simple,
attribute, array, or complex.
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Path (optional): This property identifies the location of the data for this schema field. For
more information, see
“Virtual schemas” on page 444 and “Setting the schema path”
on page 436 .
Validation settings Validation settings are applicable to any field that is the destination of a
binding. You usually modify these settings when you want to control the data validation that
the user inputs. To do so, you bind from the UI component to a data component, and then
select appropriate validation settings for the fields of the data component. One common
example is when the user input is bound to the
params
property of a connector component,
such as the XMLConnector component or WebServiceConnector component. Another
common example is when UI components are bound to data fields of the
DataSet component.
This is how validation works: After any binding is executed, the new data is checked
according to the validation rules of the destination field’s data type. A component event is
then generated to signal the results of the checking. If the data is valid, then the valid event is
generated; otherwise, an invalid event is generated. Both components involved in the binding
emit the event. You can ignore these events. If you want anything to happen as a result of
these events (such as giving feedback to the user), you must write some ActionScript code that
receives the valid and/or invalid events.
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Validation Options: Validation options are additional settings that affect the validation
rules for this field. The settings are presented in the Validation Options dialog box, which
appears when you select this item. These settings vary according to data type. For
example, the String data type has settings for the minimum and maximum allowed length
of the data. The XML data type has a setting to control if white space is ignored when
converting from a String to XML.
NO
TE
Developers almost never have to change this setting. However, there are some
cases when the storage type for an attribute contained within the schema for an XML
file should be set to attribute.