Kevin Hoyt

I saw a recent post from Ted over at PowerSDK about dynamically generating a Flex UI from an XML document. This has actually been a moderately requested capability from some customers. For the most part, customers request the functionality because they make heavy usage of server-side business logic. This breaches the debate about how much logic should go into a Flex application on the client, and what the nature of that logic should be, which is a topic I’ll gracefully skirt for now.

One of my customers who made this request back in the Flex 1.0 days (like it was such a long time ago) already had an XML DTD they used for their applications. The business tier would generate the XML and the client would parse and build the UI as appropriate to the display mechanism. In this fashion, they could generically describe their application user interfaces that might ultimately end up running on anything from the browser to a WAP-enabled device.

It was a natural next step to have Flex perform the same processing.
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Christophe Coenraets recently posted an example of laying HTML content over Flex content in an IFRAME. The reasoning for this is that while the Flash Player does offer some HTML rendering abilities, these abilities pale in comparison to the browser. This makes sense of course, as displaying HTML is what browsers were designed to do.

Inspired by the post, I recalled a customer conversation a few months back where the inverse was desired. The customer wanted to place Flex content over HTML content. Normally this might sound like a perfect opportunity to use a DIV or IFRAME in the opposite role of Christophe’s example. The trick to this was however, that the customer wanted to be able to “roll up” the Flex content to a smaller area over the HTML content when the Flex content required less emphasis.
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