I start working on a photo library in papervision, so I look around I got an example from flashEnabledBlog, one of the problems was that the example was in flash cs3 and I need it in flex actionscript project, the other one was that the example was done with old papervision and tweener versions, so I had to port it. It’s a good start if you have to do something like it. I Include lasted versions of Tweener and Papervision in the zip file, you just have to run it.
If you remember in as2 we had _root which let us access to methods and variables in the root of the project and refer to absolute paths, I thought that as3 didn’t have _root propriety, but I was wrong. root property can be useful if you want to share some value to all the classes in the project, add events to main class that call methods declared inside the class where we are working on or call generic methods declare in root class.
To use root propriety the class that you are working on most extend a DisplayObject (Sprite,MovieCLip,etc…) because you have to add the class to the parent class. And note, you can’t use the root propriety in the constructor method, because the addChild haven’t been process yet! Well let’s stop writing and see some code:
Main.as
In the Main class I’m declaring a variable named myValue which I did the proper sets and get. I am declaring two classes, in one of them I will set the value at the Main class and in the other I will get that value back. I’m also creating a movieClip just for test purposes.
ExampleClass.as
In ExampleClass I’m setting myValue that is propriety of the Main class with some text and I’m tracing the movieClip that I create in the Main Class.
AnotherClass.as
In AnotherClass I’m tracing the myValue propriety. So the result should be: [object MovieClip]
This value is inside the Main Class
So it works ok, you only have to be carefull not refer root inside the constructor method, have the certain that you already addChild the class when you are referring to root and that the class extends a display object. If you do that, you can too have access to stage propriety, let’s check the next example:
ExampleClass.as
The result should be or stage width.
Another way to access to main proprieties, methods, etc… is with static members. In the next example I’m declaring a static property in the main class and setting and trace the value of it in the example class.
Main.as
ExampleClass.as
The result should be “Hello Word!â€, if you didn’t know this, read some books about object oriented programming and static members.
Another way to do the same thing is to pass the instance of main class as an argument to the other classes.
Main.as
Example.as
There are still another ways to access to the Main class code. I don’t know which techniques are more correct, I usually use them all depending in what I need. I hope I help someone.
Today I spend a considerable amount of time trying to change this (10000000) into this (10.000.000). Because I don't think anyone should have to go throught the same ordeal here's a little function that will do it for you.
In the last month I thought Adobe had protect the loadBytes method from the loader so that only “regular†files like mp3, jpg, etc could be loaded, lots of good library’s like Benjamin Dobler wav reader stop working. What I think it is that in last version of flash player Adobe turn allowLoadBytesCodeExecution to false. If you see Adobe documentation they have written “Note: This API is likely to be replaced in a future release of AIR.†If anyone knows what really happen let me know. Now the good part, to solve that is simple, you only need to set allowLoadBytesCodeExecution to true.
I usually work in desktop application and we like it or not flash is optimized for the web so normally we have to put complete event ever time we load anything, and it’s logic, because for the web things have to be asynchronous but for desktop applications they not.
We have already load text and xml files synchronous and done some things with sql lite synchronous, I think for now images and sounds can’t be done, because even if you get the bytes, you always need to invoke loadBytes method from the loader and put a complete event listener, fuck! lol, I hope that in the next release of flash the loader have an synchronous method of load the bytes.
There it’s a class to load an xml file synchronous.
This week a friend of mine was making me questions about the binary sockets in flash, so I remember to post an example about it. I have been using a lot of XmlSockets for the last 2 years with the latest versions of flash, so it was really easy to implement binary socket because they are very similar. Binary sockets are really a great improvement in flash. I have seen a lot of implements like joysticks servers, connections to mail servers and so on; there are some examples on byteArray.org.
This example is a simple chat, it have a C sharp server and a flash client. Just click on socketServer.exe to start the server it will be listening on port 8000, then start client.exe and hit connect button. The server will accept multiple connections, so you can start more than one client, if you are testing it in different machines, just check IP address of the server and write it on the client Ip text Field and hit connect button.
The source code for client and server are on the example zip, it was done using Visual c# express 2008 and Adobe Flash 9.
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