There are lots of heavy weight solutions to drawing maps in Flex and Flash but for a recent project I needed something lightweight to display on a web portal. By lightweight, I mean something that will load quickly over a modem connection or, in our client’s situation, an air card. We already had sales alignment maps created in the ESRI SHP format so the goal was to utilize them in the Flash environment to make displaying maps more interactive. This post will cover the basics of loading SHP files and rendering them with basic ActionScript code. No Flex components were used to keep the footprint small.
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This project was originally out-sourced to a consulting form prior to my employment at LeapFrogRx. I joined after most of the architectural decisions had been made and the project was already 6 months behind schedule. As a result, the application is a mixture of pure ActionScript and Flex due to the consulting firm’s relative inexperience working in Flex. Although the project has its flaws, it gave me the opportunity to gain experience working in a pure ActionScript environment. Line, Pie, and Bar charts were written completely in ActionScript using Flash fla assets while Data Grids and Tree Map charts were written in Flex and loaded at runtime as modules.
The business logic interprets raw CSV (comma-separated values) data in combination with meta data to display a series of charts. Features such as printing and power point export were painstakingly implemented despite the mixed architecture and redraw issues. The data for the charts is completely dynamic so careful attention was paid to word wrapping, font sizes, and column widths to ensure proper display of any data provided.
