Dear Larry,
I recently got your book and eagerly read it (I've read and tried 7 chapters in 3 days).
I knew Flex when version 3 was in beta, but never programmed anything.
I've just finished chapter 8 and tried to bind the drop down list showing the Departments using a simple query to the database in the same fashion you populate the grid with the employees.
The PHP file i'm using is (getDepartments.php):
<?php
header('Content-Type: text/xml');
echo '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?><departments>';
require_once('mysql.inc.php');
$dbc = mysqli_connec