Auto generating DataGrid columns for XML data

When we have dynamic XML data as follows

 <employees>
  <employee>
   <name>Christina Coenraets</name>
   <phone>555-219-2270</phone>
   <email>ccoenraets@fictitious.com</email>
   <active>true</active>
  </employee>
  <employee>
  <name>Louis Freligh</name>
  <phone>555-219-2100</phone>
  <email>lfreligh@fictitious.com</email>
  <active>true</active>
   </employee>
</employees>

or in the form of attributes

<employees>
<employee name="Christina Coenraets" 
 phone="555-219-2270"
 email="ccoenraets@fictitious.com"
 active="true" />
<employee name="Louis Freligh" 
 phone="555-219-2100" 
 email="lfreligh@fictitious.com"
 active="true" />
</employees>

and feed into DG or ADG it won't create columns auto-magically as it does for Object data type. This may be because it is difficult to decide whether you want to display the child nodes as columns or attributes of nodes. And may be it was not appropriate to clutter the API with one more flag to do this.

I wrote the following code to get this working.

private function generateCols(input:XMLList, 
 useAttributes:Boolean = false):Array
{
 var e1:XML = input[0];
 var columns:Array = [];
 var children:XMLList ;
 if (useAttributes)
    children = e1.attributes();
 else
    children = e1.children();
 for each(var child:XML in children)
 {
    var col:DataGridColumn = new DataGridColumn();
    col.dataField = useAttributes ? "@" + child.name() : child.name();
    
    var fieldName:String = child.name();
    col.headerText = fieldName.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + fieldName.substr(1);
    columns.push(col);
 }
 return columns;
}

The source is available here

The thread related to this post is here