Learning Employee Directory 1. Introduction

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When I ran Employee Directory (ED) for the first time I was instantly impressed by its elegance. But when I started to read the code I found myself totally lost. While most other sample or tutorial applications provided by Adobe contain only a single mxml file, ED has so many folders and files. The file employeedirectory.mxml really doesn’t have much inside. There is only one line about interface (below), and I have no idea what it meant.

<ui:applicationui id="ui" width="100%" height="100%">

So I started to learn — from the very basic. My goal is to understand every single line of ED. And I use this blog to write what I have learned.

If you happen to read this blog, I should warn you that my understanding about ED may not be accurate and may even be wrong. Just let me know by email or comment if you find anything wrong. Also, you should check out ED’s author, Daniel Wabyick’s blog (http://www.wabysabi.com/blog/) as he is about to give a tutorial there.

The ED I am learning from is an earlier version (beta 1). This is much simpler than the version you can download from Adobe website now and I think it is more suitable for learning. If you don’t have this version, you can download from

http://cuixiaofei.googlepages.com/xuEmployeeDirectory.zip (2.5M)

I modified the original version so that you can compile it under beta 3. Most of the functions should work (except a few).

Next, Structure