I'd like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010.

In my previous post I pointed to the BlazeDS classes that need to be replaced in order to prevent ActionScript Number.NaN from turning into Long or Integer zeroes on the MessageBroker side.

The recommendation boiled down to re-jaring flex-messaging-core.jar or placing the modified classes somewhere earlier in the application server's classpath.

If neither option is allowed, you may configure your endpoint with the custom type marshaller, like the one below:

<channel-definition id="my-amf" class="mx.messaging.channels.AMFChannel">
<endpoint url="http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}/messagebroker/amf"
class="flex.messaging.endpoints.AMFEndpoint">
</endpoint>
<properties>   
<serialization>
<type-marshaller>com.farata.messaging.io.CustomTypeMarshaller</type-marshaller>
</serialization>
</properties>   
</channel-definition>

In BlazeDS 4 you will base your type marshaller on flex.messaging.io.ASTranslator, in BlazeDS 3 they already have one level of extension called Java15TypeMarshaller, so build on top of that one:
package com.farata.messaging.io;

import com.farata.messaging.io.amf.translator.decoder.NumberDecoder;
import flex.messaging.io.amf.translator.decoder.DecoderFactory;

// For BlazeDS 4 you should extend flex.messaging.io.ASTranslator
public class CustomTypeMarshaller extends
flex.messaging.io.Java15TypeMarshaller {

private static final NumberDecoder numberDecoder = new NumberDecoder();

public Object convert(Object source, Class desiredClass) {
if ( DecoderFactory.isNumber(desiredClass)){
return numberDecoder.decodeObject(source, desiredClass);
}else{
return super.convert(source, desiredClass);
}
}
}

This route does not require neither server-level deployment nor modification of the flex-messaging-core.jar.

Please note that in my example I repackaged NumberDecoder as <strong>com.farata</strong>.messaging.io.amf.translator.decoder.NumberDecoder

I'd like to use this opportunity and invite Flex developers living in Europe to attend our Advanced Flex Master Class in Brussels, Belgium on March 1 and 2, 2010.