Cairngorm Generators

Posted by Daniel Wanja on 02/21/2007

I looked into Cairngorm a while ago (version 0.95 I believe, pre-ModelLocator area) and didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t use Flex bindings at that time. I recently gave it a second look I liked what I saw. Using Cairngorm is at first very verbose but it provides you with a clear way of organizing your code, which is very beneficial on larger projects. Cairngorm is well documented and there are several nice examples available. Also checkout http://www.cairngormdocs.org/. So yesterday introduced Cairgorm on two Flex projects I am working on.

The first project is a larger Flex 1.5 project (65 actionscript classes, 75 Data transfer object, >100 Mxml views) that I need to migrate to Flex 2.0. I though “great time to start with Cairngorm”. So the first step was to look at all the user gestures for all the screens and create a list of events, map these events to commands, create 3 delegates and services to handle all the remote calls. On paper that was pretty fast to do, but I didn’t want to create all the Cairngorm supporting class by hand. Handily I found the following generator that is a PHP application:

Cairngen


It targets currently only Cairngorm 2.0 and not the newer Cairngorm 2.1. So after generate the supporting classes I had to manually do some changes. But thanks for this tool.

The second project is a smaller Flex application backed by a Ruby on Rails server. And I found the following Ruby on Rails Cairngorm generators at http://code.google.com/p/cairngorm-rails-generator/

Simply copy the generators to your ”/vendor/generators” folder, the generators folder will then contain the following generators:

cairngorm
command
delegate
event
vo
worbservice

Note there are several places in Rails you can set generators, but that did the trick for me. The I created a “src” folder in my Rails root folder and issues the following commands:

Then you can use these different generator commands to build the structure you require, the events, commands, delegates and more. 
   ./script/generate cairngorm org/onrails/myspyder   
   ./script/generate delegate  org/onrails/myspyder server
   ./script/generate command   org/onrails/myspyder show_page_watch server
   ./script/generate event     org/onrails/myspyder show_page_watch

I issued the generate script for each of the commands that application needs to support. The main controller now looks as follows (still very early in the development phase)

package org.onrails.myspyder.control
{
    import com.adobe.cairngorm.control.FrontController;
    import com.adobe.cairngorm.control.CairngormEventDispatcher;
    import org.onrails.myspyder.control.*;
    import org.onrails.myspyder.command.*;

    public class MySpyderController extends FrontController
    {
        public function MySpyderController()
        {
            initialiseCommands();
        }

        public function initialiseCommands() : void
        {
            // Application Tabs
            addCommand( ShowAccountEvent.EVENT_SHOW_ACCOUNT, ShowAccountCommand );
            addCommand( ShowPagesEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGES, ShowPagesCommand );
            addCommand( ShowSettingsEvent.EVENT_SHOW_SETTINGS, ShowSettingsCommand );            

            // Page List
            addCommand( ReloadPagesEvent.EVENT_RELOAD_PAGES, ReloadPagesCommand );
            addCommand( AddPageEvent.EVENT_ADD_PAGE, AddPageCommand );
            addCommand( ReloadPageEvent.EVENT_RELOAD_PAGE, ReloadPageCommand );
            addCommand( RemovePageEvent.EVENT_REMOVE_PAGE, RemovePageCommand );
            addCommand( SavePageEvent.EVENT_SAVE_PAGE, SavePageCommand );

            // Page Details
            addCommand( ShowPageWatchEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_WATCH, ShowPageWatchCommand );
            addCommand( ShowPageWatchResultEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_WATCH_RESULT, ShowPageWatchResultCommand );

            // Html Section
            addCommand( ShowOriginalPageEvent.EVENT_SHOW_ORIGINAL_PAGE, ShowOriginalPageCommand );
            addCommand( ShowPageSectionEvent.EVENT_SHOW_PAGE_SECTION, ShowPageSectionCommand );
            addCommand( SelectPageSectionEvent.EVENT_SELECT_PAGE_SECTION, SelectPageSectionCommand );

        }    

    }

}

Let me know your experience with Flex and Cairngorm.