As you may have noticed, you can’t iterate over the properties of an Actionscript 3 class as if they were normal properties of a generic object, unless the class is dynamic of course.
here’s what I mean:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 | package { public class Widget { public var color:String = "green"; public var shape:String = "round"; public var age:String = "5"; } } var widget:Widget = new Widget(); for(var i:String in widget) { trace(i); // Whaaaaa? Output is blank! } |
Ok, so as I said.. it doesn’t work. However, there’s trick that you can use! generate an XML list of the class variables, then access them as attributes (using the above example class):
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 | var widget:Widget = new Widget(); var xmlList:XMLList = flash.utils.describeType(widget)..variable; var vars:Object = new Object(); for (var n:int; n < xmlList.length(); n++) { vars[xmlList[n]. @ name] = widget[xmlList[n]. @ name]; } for (var prop:String in vars) { trace(prop); // lists: age, color. shape } |
I took it one step further and pushed the variables into an object called vars so that I could show iterating it as an object.
This came in really handy for me earlier today. Maybe later I’ll elaborate, but I hope that you can see the value in being able to do something like this!
