Handling asynchronous Flex calls to Salesforce.com using an MVC framework

June 3rd, 2008

I’m working on a Flex applications using the Flex Toolkit for Apex and Model-Glue:Flex as the MVC framework. I’ve got my main applications, controllers, models and views working well. One on my requirements is to make a call to Salesforce.com, fetch some user settings and then display a specific canvas depending on the returned values.

I dispatch an event, the controller makes the request to Salesforce.com and passes it a responder to process the returned results. However due to the asynchronous nature of the Flex Toolkit, I don’t really know when the results are returned from Salesforce.com. Here’s my solutions to notify my application when results are returned by Salesforce.com.

I setup a private member to track the status of the transaction:

1	private var _transactionComplete:Boolean;

I couldn’t use public members as I wanted to listen for changes to _transactionComplete so I had to write getters/setters for the data binding and to process the notifications when the value was set:

[Bindable]
public function set transactionComplete (value:Boolean):void
{
    _transactionComplete = value;
}
 
public function get transactionComplete ():Boolean
{   
    if (_transactionComplete == true) {
        showCanvas();
    }
    return _transactionComplete;        
}
 
public function showCanvas():void {
    if (accountController.user.isAdmin) {
        // do something
    } else {
        // do something else
    }
}

Since my controller does all of the heavy lifting, I added the following line to the responder which notify my application that the results have returned from Salesforce.com (Of course I have to reset my transactionComplete to false before I make the initial call to Salesforce.com):