Design Pattern / Best Practice Question

Question

Hi,
I have been using Flex for a while now, but there is a
scenario which I still have not found a solution I'm entirely happy
with. I'm wondering if anyone else out there might have suggestions
on a design pattern or best practice.
Suppose I have a view which depends on model data which
resides in some back end systems. That model data may or may not
have been loaded (e.g. via a web service or remote object call) at
the time the view is displayed.
I don't know if the user will ever visit this part of the
application so I would prefer to defer retrieval of the data until
the user actually navigates to this view. Or I want to retrieve the
data each time the view is displayed because the data is dynamic
and could change between one presentation of the view and the next.
Because the data comes from several systems, I cannot simply
make one service call and display the view when it completes and
all the data is available. I need to call several services which
could complete in any order but I only want to display my view
after I know all of them have completed and all of the model data
is available. Otherwise, I can present the user an incomplete view
(e.g. some combo boxes are empty until the corresponding service
call to get the data completes).
The solution I like best so far is to dispatch a single event
(I am using Cairngorm) handled by a single command which acts as
the caller and responder for all of the services. This command then
remembers which responses it has received and dispatches another
event to navigate to the view once all the results have returned.
If the services being called are used in different
combinations on different screens, this results in proliferation of
events and commands. An event and command for each service and
additional events and commands to bundle the services and the
handling of their responses in the right combinations for each of
the views.
Another approach is to have some helper class listen for all
of the model changes and only display the view when the model
enters some state that is acceptable. It is sometimes difficult to
determine just by looking at the model whether it is in the right
state (e.g. how can I tell that a collection is the new collection
that should just have been requested versus an old one lingering
from a previous call). The logic required can get kind of
convoluted and brittle.
Basically, all of the solutions I've come up with so far seem
less than ideal and a little hackish. I keep thinking there is some
elegant solution out there that I am just missing ... but so far,
no luck finding it. Thoughts?
Thanks.
Bill

Answer 1

i think a service class is right - to coordinate your calls.
i would have 1 event per call (so you could listen to individual
responses if you wanted to).
then i would use a flag. if you want to check for staleness,
you would probably want two objects to map your service flag to
lastRequested and lastCompleted. when you check, check if it's
completed, and if it's not stale and that your lastRequested is
less than lastCompleted (meaning that you're not currently waiting,
i.e. you've returned since making a request). then make the request
and update your lastRequested.
here's a snippet of what i mean.
./paul
public static const SVC1_LOADED:int = 1;
public static const SVC2_LOADED:int = 2;
public static const SVC3_LOADED:int = 4;
public static const SVCALL_LOADED:int = 7;
private var completedFlag:int = 0;
then each call would have it's own callback.
private function onSvc1Complete( evt:Event):void {
completedFlag |= SVC1_LOADED;
lastCompleted[ SVC1_LOADED ] = getTimer();
dispatchEvent( new Event("svc1complete") );
checkDone();
private function checkDone():void{
if( completedFlag == SVCALL_LOADED )
dispatchEvent(new Event( "allLoaded" ));