Free Flowing Code

I love error messages that are vague and don’t really spell out what the problem is, especially when you’re first learning a new language or technology.

Most of the time a google search turns up the answer pretty quickly, but this one didn’t turn up much.
Luckily, it turned out to be a typo: I forgot to put in a couple lines while using an AdvancedDataGrid – I think anything that uses columns of data would do the same thing.

I think you can also get this error or something similar if you bind data to a dataprovider – such as dataProvider=”{myArrayCollection}” and then you also set the dataProvider in your code, such as component.dataProvider = myArrayCollection, but more then likely you’ll just an app that doesn’t load data correctly.

Anyway, the error verbatim is “Multiple initializers for property ‘dataProvider’. (note: ‘dataProvider’ is the default property of ‘mx.controls.AdvancedDataGrid’).”

So my code, using a bindable array collection (ac), looks like this.

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<mx:AdvancedDataGrid id="adgICMP" dataProvider="{ac}" width="100%" height="100%">
    <mx:AdvancedDataGridColumn dataField="field1" headerText="header1" />
    <mx:AdvancedDataGridColumn dataField="field2" headerText="header2"/>
</mx:AdvancedDataGrid>

Guess what’s missing? Yep, columns. Apparently not using throws the error, but only when using bracket binding {}

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<mx:AdvancedDataGrid id="adg" dataProvider="{ac}" width="100%" height="100%">
    <mx:columns>
       <mx:AdvancedDataGridColumn dataField="field1" headerText="header1" />
       <mx:AdvancedDataGridColumn dataField="field2" headerText="header2"/>
    </mx:columns>
</mx:AdvancedDataGrid>

If I used something like adg.dataProvider = ac in actionscript, the code would compile with no errors, although I wouldn’t get the results I wanted and it would dump out all the values in ArrayCollection