In Part 1, I covered the basic setup of LiveCycle Data Services 3 Beta sitting on a MySQL database. Now, I’ll get into the Flash Builder side of things, and talk about the Modeler plugin and model driven development.

Setup Modeler Plugin

1. Get Flash Builder 4 Beta (download)
2. Get the LCDS Modeler plugin (download)
3. Install the Modeler plugin:
   • Unzip to a temp folder, which will create a plugins folder
   • Copy the plugins folder’s contents directly into Flash Builder’s plugins folder (typically located in /Applications/Adobe Flash Builder Beta/plugins if you are on a Mac)
   • Restart Flash Builder

Model Driven Development

1. Create a new Flex project
   • In Flash Builder, right-click and say New > Flex Project
     
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   • Choose J2EE for Application Server Type, and select LCDS
   • Click Next to configure your server
     
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   • Uncheck Use Default Location, and fill in your root folder, url, and context (see screenshot)
   • Click Validate Configuration (this will fail if LCDS is not running), and then Finish
2. Create a new data model
   • Select the Data/Services tab in the bottom window
   • Click the Edit Active Data Model icon in the tab’s menubar (see screenshot)
     
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   • This will create a new data model for your project, and bring up MyApp.fml in the Modeler’s design view (see screenshot)
   • To see the file in the Package Explorer, click the Filters icon (see screenshot), then uncheck .* and .model
3. Connect to the server
   • Switch to the Adobe Data Model perspective
   • In the RDS Dataview window, click the RDS Configuration icon
     
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   • Set the Context Root to myapp (because our server is running at http://localhost:8080/myapp/)
   • Click Test Connection, and then OK
4. Verify the server’s connection to MySQL
   • In the RDS Dataview window, expand until we can see our tables
     
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   • Right-click on a table, and select Show Table Contents
     
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5. Edit the model
   • Just drag tables from the RDS Dataview to add them to the model
     
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6. Browse the generated services and code
   • Once the model is updated, the builder automatically generates standard CRUD services. Switch back to the Flash Builder perspective, and you can view them in the Data/Services tab
     
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   • The generated code is available in the Package Explorer. Files you don’t want to touch are prefixed with an underscore. The other files, like Player.as and PlayerService.as are available for you to customize.
     
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More Docs

1. LCDS Modeler Guide (zip)

Conclusion

Once again, that’s it. I’ll have to learn something new about LCDS before I write more.