360flex - E4X

presented by Danny Patterson

New XML classes in AS3

• all old functions from AS2 still available
• XMLList - if there is only one item in the list it will act like the type of that item
• QName
• Namespace

Creating XML Objects

• Parse XML Strings - pass a string into a constructor
• Use a literal
• Create an XMLList

Using the language

Property accessors

• Everything is an XMLObject, from the children and the data contained in them... even comments!!
• Two dots returns all items, regardless of their level in the XML schema (to retrieve nested children)
• Wildcards (*) - gets all elements under the catalog, so you don't have to know the child or element names
• @* - gets all the attributes of a child, useful if you don't know the schema but want to see what's available

Filtering

• can set conditional statements in variable assignments of type XMLList (i.e.
• @id==0 will get element(s) where id value is 0
• price<5 will get elements where value of price is less than 5
• price>=35 && price <=50 will get elements where value of price is between 35 and 50
• desc="toaster" will get elements where value of desc is toaster (type string)

Iterating (fancy word for "looping")

• "for" loops similar to other PL's but in var declaration, useful for totaling columns
• "for..in" loops
• Neither of these are recommended methods... so try one of these instead!
• "for each..in" loops

Namespaces (how to group related objects) - extends Sprite

• Create an envelope with soap namespace and then create a body element
• Create a variable of type Namespace that points to the soap and add to the body
• Use a default xml namespace and add to the body

Sending and Loading

• No longer a part of the XML object
• URLRequest
• URLLoader