I came across an issue in Flex where I was unable to set my filterFunction=null to bring back all data after it had been filtered. I was trying to use this on my reset function:

private function resetFilter():void {
  advancedDataGrid.dataProvider.filterFunction = null;
  advancedDataGrid.dataProvider.refresh();
}

Previously, when my dataprovider had been a simple ArrayCollection that would have worked fine. When using a groupingCollection you must do this:

private function resetFilter():void {
  advancedDataGrid.dataProvider.filterFunction = returnAllItems;
  advancedDataGrid.dataProvider.refresh();
}
 
private function returnAllItems(item:Object):Boolean {
  return true;
}

This workaround will allow your grouped data to return to its original state.

I came across the need to convert a comma delimited string into an Array in AS3 today, and surprisingly the answer did not pop up on Google like I would have thought. First we start off with a string:

myString = "1-John,2-Barry,3-Stacy,4-Bob"

The end result will look like:

myObject[0].name="John"
myObject[0].id="1"
 
myObject[1].name="Barry"
myObject[1].id="2"
 
myObject[2].name="Stacy"
myObject[2].id="3"
 
myObject[3].name="Bob"
myObject[3].id="4"

Actionscript 3 actually makes this task very simple. You first need to use the split() function with a comma delimiter to separate each item and store it within a new array:

var peopleList:Array = myString.split(",");

Next, we create a new object to hold the data and split the data once more using the hyphen:

myObject[0].people = new Array();
for (var x:int=0;x<peopleList.length;x++){
  var peopleDetail:Array = peopleList[x].split("-");
  var obj:Object = new Object();
  obj.id = peopleDetail[0];
  obj.name = peopleDetail[1];
  myObject[0].people.push(obj);
}

I’m sure there are plenty of ways to achieve this, but it seemed to work for me with not a whole lot of code. Hope this helps someone searching for the answer like I was.