Comments on: My best practice for MVC with Adobe Flex3

By: Vikram

Vikram — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 10:26:12 +0000

Nice work and simply superb.Thank you for sharing such a great example.

By: Amit Mathur

Amit Mathur — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 20:30:54 +0000

Really awesome.I was looking for this.Thanks…

By: buddy

buddy — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 13:37:46 +0000

Very nice and implemented in an easy manner,,,Great

By: Timo

Timo — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:26:33 +0000

@Ned Thank you and good luck with your project ;-)

By: Ned

Ned — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 06:00:51 +0000

First off, I would like to thank you for this simple but very effective design approach to flex. I have tried honestly about a hand full of flex MVC framework from mate to robot legs. but I like the idea of not depending on any third part library code. coming from a Java development background I can say that this approach fits my thinking pattern more closely, well done pal. By the way I am very new to Flex and have been given a huge project to take on. You have set the path for me that I wish to take.

keep up the good work!

By: Timo

Timo — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 19:21:20 +0000

Yes and it’s actually pretty simple.

You just have to set one of the references to null, for example controller=null (in the view). Then, the garbage collector will remove the controller from memory unless there is another reference to it somewhere in your program (hello, memory leaks! :-)).
Same goes for view=null (in the controller).

If you don’t like this concept of two-way referencing you could also remove one of them:

The reference of controller->view is unavoidable. Every view component should have a controller.

The other way round is redundant in most cases and can thus be omitted.
It is “best practice” anyway.

The only reason why a view component would need a reference to its controller is that it needs to call certain methods of it.
Without a reference to the controller, you could fire custom events which are then caught by the controller.
This concept of loose coupling is a lot better than the hard-wired way of using 2-way references.

In a nutshell: (Best practice)
– Give every view a controller, so the controller can access the properties and methods of your view.
– Don’t create a reference back!
– Instead, define events which are being fired by the view component and then caught by the controller.

I must admit that I didn’t think of that when I wrote this article :-)

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:55:52 +0000

There’s only one problem ….
you are referencing the controller in the view (where it’s instantiated) and the view in the controller (in your constructor).
This causes the garbage collector to never get rid of one or the other.
I’m building a complex application using modules, and I’m facing this very same problem. Any suggestion?

By: Timo

Timo — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:25:54 +0000

You are welcome! I am glad that I was able to explain something easy in a simple way. Don’t know why some people like to make things more complicated than they are.

By: fer

fer — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:08:45 +0000

Thank you! I’ve looking for something like this everywhere! and I finally find a simple application.
I don’t know why, but everyone else is trying to explain things with some very complex applications…

Anyway.. you’ve helped me a lot! thanks!..