A Flex CMS Makeover

I’d like to discuss a bit of my experience tinkering with re-skinning portions of our Content Management System, i3SiteTools,using Flex 2. The tools that make up the ‘CMS’ (sometimes referred to as the ‘SMS’ for Site Management System) have been built and tweeked over the past 10 years by several developers. A lot of thought and energy went in to making the display forms be able to do tricks like searching and column sorting. Generally, this was accomplished by harnessing the power of the backend with SQL and self-posting pages. A lot of conditional logic was incorporated into the ColdFusion pages to build and manage the display.

I thought to myself, what the heck, lets see how much of this can be accomplished with the built in capabilities of Flex components. Here’s what I did with only a few hours work.

I managed to cut out about 500 lines of combined ColdFusion and HTML code that was used to generate and manage not only the display, but also the self posting re-direct links that powered things like the search functionality, sorting and pagination. The best part is, using built in features of components like the DataGrid, I cut the required number of calls to the database for things like searching and sorting to only one. We’ve not yet tested this for scalability, but for a few hundred record sets, I can even perform ‘real-time’ key press by key press searching on any of the table columns (this means that the search is filtering continuously on-the-fly as you type each letter of your keywords).

The data tables shown here are dynamically generated, as were the previous HTML versions. This is possible because of the way i3SiteTools stores meta data for each tool in the CMS. The next step is to expand the use of Flex from the (relatively) simple list viewing, to managing the dynamic form creation that is still utilizing ColdFusion and HTML for generating displays and capturing user interaction.