About the Data Provider
Several Flex components, such as the DataGrid, Tree, and ComboBox controls, take input data from a data provider. A data provider is a collection of objects, similar to an array. For example, a Tree control reads data from the data provider to define the structure of the tree and any associated data assigned to each tree node.
The data provider creates a level of abstraction between Flex components and the data that you use to populate them. You can populate multiple components from the same data provider, switch data providers for a component at runtime, and modify the data provider so that changes are reflected by all components using the data provider.
You can think of the data provider as the model, and the Flex components as the view onto the
model. By separating the model from the view, you can change one without changing the other.
<!-- MyComboBox.mxml -->
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<mx:ComboBox xmlns:mx="http://www.macromedia.com/2003/mxml">
<mx:dataProvider>
<mx:Array>
<mx:String>AK</mx:String>
<mx:String>AL</mx:String>
...
</mx:Array>
</mx:dataProvider>
</mx:ComboBox>
Thanks