Sam Shrefler

After my last tutorial/post about using JSON, Mark Piller from TheMidnightCoders commented that my requested functionality (Easily pass back client classes back and forth) could be completed using his product, WebOrb.NET. Thanks Mark!

After further investigation, I was still a little confused as how to accomplish this using a non-beta, standard (free) version of WebOrb.NET. Well, it turns out; WebOrb v2.0 works great with AMF0, the remoting format from Flash 8. This led me to Renaun’s RemoteObjectAMF0 which easily plugs into a Cairngorm ServiceLocator. So there’s the pieces, now to put together the puzzle.

First you will need the following for this tutorial: Visual Studio 2005, Adobe Flex Builder 2.0, Renaun’s RemoteObjectAMF0 (link), and Cairngorm (link).

Install WebOrb 2.0. Following all the system defaults should work just fine.

Open Visual Studio and Create a New Web Service: File -> New -> Website -> Empty Web Site.
Create a new C# Class: File -> New -> File -> Class -> Name the class EmployeeService.cs. You may be prompted about placing the cs file in the App_Code Folder, choose Yes.

A file EmployeeService.cs will be created in the App_Code Folder. Open EmployeeService.cs. Enter the following code.

[csharp]
using System;
using System.Web;
using Weborb.Util;
using net.shrefler.vo;

namespace net.shrefler.service
{
public class EmployeeService
{
public EmployeeService()
{
}

public EmployeeVO[] getEmployees()
{
EmployeeVO[] emps = new EmployeeVO[2];
EmployeeVO emp = new EmployeeVO();

emp.firstName = “Sam”;
emp.lastName = “Shrefler”;
emps[0] = emp;
emp = new EmployeeVO();
emp.firstName = “Your”;
emp.lastName = “Name”;
emps[1] = emp;

return emps;
}
}
}
[/csharp]

Create a new C# Class: File -> New -> File -> Class -> Name the class EmployeeVO.cs. You may be prompted about placing the cs file in the App_Code Folder, choose Yes.

A file EmployeeVO.cs will be created in the App_Code Folder. Open EmployeeVO.cs. Enter the following code.

[csharp]
using System;
using System.Web;

namespace net.shrefler.vo
{
public class EmployeeVO
{
public string firstName;
public string lastName;

public EmployeeVO()
{
}
}
}
[/csharp]

Next we’ll need to add WebOrb to our application. In your webroot folder should be a weborb directory. Copy “weborb.dll” from its bin directory into a bin directory in your new website. Then copy “weborb.config” and “web.config” from the weborb root directory to the root of your local website.

Open weborb.config and add the following code inside the tag.

[xml]

net.shrefler.EmployeeVO
net.shrefler.EmployeeVO

[/xml]

Rather than describing all the flex code: I decided to just use the Source View. So here is the flex code: (link)

I hope this helps everyone as much as I hope it will help me. As always, comments are appreciated. Good Luck!