r3T3k’t

Silent but Deadly

Scripting languages often have the weakness of silent failure, which pays for the “robustness” value. Configuration-based “languages”, particularly XML (the latest magic cool-ade) ones have a similar silent-failure weakness.

Flex 3.0 adds these two together plus a minimal amount of available documentation, provides loads of power, but also a huge Achilles heal of super silent failure. This makes developing a huge pain in the ass.

I’ve currently developed a front end of Flex to hit a wsdl-defined web service. It can’t seem to navigate “complex” data objects coming across the web service. By complex, I mean an object that contains an object that has basic values for properties.

Is there a simple way to solve this problem? I don’t know. When Flex is navigating XML data it can go arbitrarily deep (I assume, I’ve only gone two deep), but ween it’s dealing with its native objects it barfs.

And I have no idea how to resolve, or track down this problem.

Edit: Finally did fix the problem.  The DataGrid needs to be customized to manipulate complex data.  So, the data was there, but the UI element failed the task.