28.1 Designing the Application Structure

The first thing to do when developing this scheduler program is to determine which pieces should make up the entire application, and how they fit together. We'll design the first version of the application to write data to a local shared object. Later, we'll revise the application so that it can be written to disk and retrieved from any computer. Initially, the entire application can be built using a single Flash document (though later we will add a server-side script as well). This application depends on the Calendar component available as part of the Flash UI Components Set 2. You must drag an instance from the Components panel to the Stage to add it to the Library.

In the course of the chapter, we will create the following custom components:

Time selector component (TimeSelector)

This component is composed of a menu of 24 button movie clips (TimeSelectorItem components). Each item in the menu represents an hour of the day.

Time selector item component (TimeSelectorItem)

These components make up the time selector menu. When a user has added schedule information to the hour that corresponds to the time selector item, the item is highlighted.

Schedule component (Schedule)

The Schedule component is the framework for each of the schedule dates (ScheduleItem components). The Schedule component is analogous to the binder that holds the pages of a day planner.

Schedule item component (ScheduleItem)

The Schedule component is composed of schedule items. Each schedule item corresponds to a calendar date. A schedule item can have values for the following:

Hourly schedule

Contains the user's schedule for each hour of the day

Notes

A user's overall notes for the day

To do

A user's to-do list for the day

Notifiers

An array of events the user has specified he would like to be notified of the day before the event

Notifier displayer component (Notifier)

This component displays a list of notifications for upcoming scheduled events.