Starting in PMF 5.2.1, we’ve started shipping prebuilt, customizable gadgets built in Adobe Flex. I wanted to spend a little time here explaining some of the process that went into building these gadgets, and how they can be used by you, our customers.

First off, let me explain the basics of the architecture we’ve put in place to manage these Flex gadgets. If a Flex type gadget is added into a dashboard, that dashboard will now load another Flex object that we call the gadgetDataHost. This host is what all of our Flex reporting gadgets use to retrieve data from PMF’s core. We use this intermediary Flex object to allow for caching and sharing of data between Flex gadgets. Under the covers, each Flex gadget uses a LocalConnection object (Adobe Documentation) to communicate with the gadgetDataHost. The host also uses a LocalConnection object to respond to the Flex gadget with the requested data. This method of communication does have its limits, namely, 40K of data is the max amount we can transmit (but I was only able to get that large of data set in test by retrieving a large set of Measures over all of time).

In future postings, I’ll continue this analysis of the Flex gadgets. Feel free to reply to this posting with any comments you may have. Also feel free to email me if you would like further information.

Thank you all for being such supportive customers,
Arin Lipman
Programmer
WebFOCUS Performance Management
Arin_Lipman@ibi.com

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Bob Jude Ferrante,

Thanks Arin,

We are upgrading our version 5.1 to 5.2.1.
I'm sure that your post will help us soon.

Regards,

Carlos