Working with schemas in the Schema tab (Flash Professional only)

The Schema tab in the Component inspector lets you view and edit the schema for each data-related component in your application. The Schema tab lists the component's bindable properties, which are properties to which you can bind that commonly contain dynamic data. All components have properties, but by default, to reduce UI clutter, the Schema tab shows only properties that commonly contain dynamic data. (You can, however, bind to any property by either adding it to the Schema tab or using ActionScript code. For more information, see Working with bindings in the Bindings tab (Flash Professional only).)

The Schema tab also lists properties' data types, their internal structure, and various special attributes. The data binding engine needs this information for each component to handle your data correctly.

The following illustration shows the Schema tab for the XMLConnector component used in Creating a simple application. The top pane shows the bindable properties for the xmlConn instance, with the food:Array property selected, and the bottom pane shows the settings for the food:Array property.

A component's schema describes the structure and type of data but is independent of how the data is actually stored. For example, the results from a WebServiceConnector component or an XMLConnector component could have identical schemas, even though the web service results are stored as ActionScript data structures (objects, arrays, strings, Boolean values, and numbers), and the XMLConnector component results are stored as XML objects. When you use data binding to access fields within a component's schema, you use the same procedure regardless of how the data is stored.

A component identifies which of its properties are bindable. These bindable properties appear in the Schema panel as top-level schema items (component properties). A component property can have its own internal schema that defines additional schema fields that can be bound to other component properties within your application; for example, when you introspect a WSDL for a WebServiceConnector component. The WSDL definition describes the parameters and the results for a web service. The WebServiceConnector component contains two bindable properties (params and results). When the WebServiceConnector component introspects the WSDL, Flash automatically creates the schema for the params and results properties so it mirrors the schema defined within the WSDL.

There are several ways to define the schema for a component. Here are the most common ways:

For an XMLConnector component, you can import an XML sample file to define the schema. See Connecting to XML data with the XMLConnector component (Flash Professional only).
For a WebServiceConnector component, you can import the WSDL for a web service to define the schema. See Connecting to web services with the WebService connector component (Flash Professional only).
For a DataSet component, which is typically the intermediary component between your connector components and UI components, you define the schema using the Schema panel. See Adding a component property to a schema and Adding a schema field to a schema item.
For UI components, the schema is predefined within the component. You can modify the schema to create additional bindable properties, as shown in Adding a component property to a schema.

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