"Open in Excel": Another AIR 2 Mini Sample

November 24, 2009 By 33 Comments

In Adobe AIR 1.0 and 1.5, there were different options to “open” the data of a Flex DataGrid in Excel. For example, you could leverage the AIR native drag-and-drop support to drag rows from the DataGrid to an open Excel spreadsheet. You could also drag rows to the desktop (or anywhere on the file system) as an .xls file. These two approaches are demonstrated in my Salesbuilder sample application. Another approach was to use a server roundtrip to download the generated .xls file from the server and force Excel to open with the data.

There was however no immediate way to implement a straight (client-side only) “Open in Excel” feature (aka click a button to open your DataGrid data in Excel). With AIR 2.0 and the new File.openWithDefaultApplication() method this becomes extremely easy to implement. In the sample below, I provide an example of this new feature. The sample also supports the drag-and-drop approach from the AIR application to Excel and from the AIR application to the desktop (or anywhere else on the file system). This sample uses the as3xls library to create the Excel spreadsheet. View Source is enabled.

Installation Instructions

  1. Download the AIR 2.0 beta runtime here.
  2. Download AIR2Excel.air here.
  3. Double-click AIR2Excel.air in Explorer or Finder to start the installation process.

Filed Under: Air, Flex

"Voice Notes": Record Voice Notes and Persist them in SQLite with AIR 2

November 18, 2009 By 11 Comments

As you probably already know, the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 betas are now available on Adobe Labs. I’ve been playing with the Microphone API in AIR 2 while working on the booth here at Devoxx, and built this small sample application that allows you to record voice notes and store them in the embedded SQLite database so that you can replay them later.

No rocket science here (and no designer involved), just one more microphone API sample. You can install the application here (AIR 2 required):

Installation Instructions

  1. Download the AIR 2.0 beta runtime here.
  2. Download voicenotes.air here.
  3. Double-click voicenotes.air in Explorer or Finder to start the installation process.

View Source (right click) is enabled.

Filed Under: Air, Flex