Oscar Trelles

To Flex or Not To Flex

People I talk to have an idea of what is my position regarding Flex: is a great product, but if you work in Advertising, producing apps and websites that 99% of the time demand very distinctive characteristics, then Flex is not for you. Now, when I thought I had finally found the project that would allow me to catch up with all the new developments in the Flex realm, I won’t be able to go on, because of some appearent shortcomings.

Here is a very quick exercise that I’ve put together to better explain what we are experiencing, and hopefully get some insight from you, experienced Flex developers.

• * No Drag-selection
  This is a very important issue for any one planning to create RIAs for assets management, especially if they are visual assets. This is functionality shared by all operating systems that have a visual interface, and thus a feature that one wuld expect in Flex. Right now, the only way to select multiple items is by click on them while pressing the Ctrl or Shift keys
• * Dragging multiple items is buggy
  
  • There are a few issues in this topic, the most notorious being that, when dragging multiple item from a row, the “shadow” icons appear superimpossed, not what one would expect.
  • In addition to that, depending on what item you click to start dragging the selection, the mouse pointer appears disconnected, misleading the user to where s/he should drop the selection to finish the task.
  • A minor detail is that, by default, the insertion callout is horizontal, gain not what one would expect. I wonder if this has anything whatsoever to do with the direction of the TileList.
• * Another deal breaker is that multiple selection has been disabled in the Tree component, which is a feature we wanted to use extensively throughout our project.

The main reason we wanted to use Flex is to save us the time an effort that goes into building a solid drag and drop functionality, but with all the issues we have found on our first day of research, I am considering rolling out our own stuff, instead of having to hack into the Flex components.

Has anybody else faced these obstacles before?

Have you been able to work around them?