BetaDesigns( Blog ) Flex and Component Development

3Jun/082

Canon Buzzwords goes Live!

The application went live on Friday lunchtime at http://www.canon-europe.com/buzzwordbuster in support of Canon's attendance at "DRUPA", the "World Cup" of Print Industry events!.

(The application is also available in German at http://www.canon.de/druck_glossar).

There were some interesting challenges presented with this application such as

  • Bilingual
  • Deeplinking ( without the use of JavaScript )
  • PureMVC Framework
  • Component Driven.

The problem with the Deeplinking was the fact that Canon uses a content management system that doesn't allow you to add any JavaScript to the Page! Not even as an include. This posed a big problem with the app due to the fact that Deeplinking was requirement of the brief. As you may or may not know Deeplinking is enabled in Flex via an external folder called history and within this folder you have history.js and history.css files both of which are needed to allow Deeplinking to work.

However, I was not allowed to "include" any JavaScript but i could use browser specific JavaScript as this is built into the browser and as such should run automatically so ::

if( ExternalInterface.available )
{
   var call : String    = 'window.location.href.toString'
   var url : String 	= ExternalInterface.call( call );
   var pos : int 	= url.indexOf( '#' );
   if( pos == -1 || pos == url.length - 1 )
   {
    	//No fragments so return;
       	return;
   }else{
        //Do Fragment Processing here;
   }
}
Comments (2) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Hey,

    Is the data pulled from an XML document?

    By the way…good job.

  2. @Max
    Hi Max, yeah the data is loaded in from a seperate XML file and the application localization is also done using a secondary locations.XML file.


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