Ideas for display?

Question

i have a bunch of old reports that i need to display somehow. we are trying to snazz them up a bit with flex. eventually the format will totally change
to XML or something like that. However, for now i have what i have and need to do something with it. Here's the general layout:
3 Lines of header (all kinds of information like page number, report type, date, time, etc.
5 lines of ID header (information about the specific person Identified for this report, including that person's ID number)
15-30 lines of report information.
this repeats for the whole of the report in the same format.
Page: 1      Customer Report       User: MGolenty
Date: July 5, 2009               Time: 9:06AM
Report: Customer                
ID: 789101112  John Connor  Date of Birth: 11/10/1975
Address:                              County: Los Angeles
456789 Main Street
Los Angeles, CA
United States
(a bunch of boring report lines)
We originally were thinking of altering the existing reports to ad CDATA formatting with html tags to add some functionality. Particularly, we need to make the ID: clickable so that a database query is fired and results are displayed in a window (preferable) or a new browser tab (acceptable). However, as we got into the TextField.htmlText property further and further it dawned on us that htmlText was not made for such 'fancy' functionality.I was hoping that maybe it's functionality had been expanded in Flex 4, but it looks like it has gone untouched (and with good reason)
My idea is to use a data grid and display different pieces in different components. We could just parse reports into the the datagrid every time they display. That way, we could just fire an event when the ID: is clicked and have a fancy component display the results of the query.
Anybody have any other thoughts on effective ways to display this type of a report? thanks!

Answer 1

The report can be a custom MXML component, that way you can create each section however you would like.
For example, the first header section could be a VBox with labels and a linkbutton if you need the ability to have a link.
You could also use states to enable collapsible report sections.
MXML component is the way to go.
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