As part of the ActionScript 2 Atom class that I am putting together, I have created an ActionScript class that represents a W3CDateTime string. This is the format that Atom uses to represent dates. A beta of the class and simple usage example is included below. If you have any questions or suggestions (especially parsing optimizations), or find any bugs, please post them in the comments. Here is a simple example of the class in use:

One of the issues I ran into while building the MXNA WebService example app, was that both the ComboBox and DataGrid both broadcast “change” events. This meant that I could not have a separate function to listen for each event (and have the functions run within the scope of the feedView class). There were two solutions to this. The first was to have a switch statement in my change event handler, that checked the eventObt.

If you have used the Central trace panel, you may have noticed the “App Name Filter” text field in the bottom left of the panel. This is used to filter trace messages coming from Central so you only see messages coming from your application. So, how do you use this? It is actually pretty simple. First, you need to set a global variable in your App / Agent / Pod that tells Central your application name.

A question was posted to my weblog asking how to retrieve the data for the individual bar chart section selected in the 3D Bar chart included as part of the Flash Charting Components Set 2 on DRK 4. If you are using a listener to capture the select / press event, it is very simple as all of the data is passed to the listener method. Here is an example:

One of the big hassles of developing with ActionScript is that when trying to access properties and functions that do not exist, the Flash IDE does not throw an error. This can make it very difficult to debug code that is not working due to something as simple as a misspelled variable name. Below is some simple code that shows how to trace errors when your code tries to access properties / functions that do not exist.

One of the requests that I got for the Google search application that Josh Dura and I have been working on, is to give the user the option to open links in a new window. This makes sense, since if you leave the page, the Flash application looses its state. Well, I added an option in the settings panel to always open links in a new window, but I decided to also add support for SHIFT or CTRL clicking a link to open it in a new window (since a lot of people do this out of habit now.

I have received a couple of emails over the past couple of days, asking how to manually loop through a RecordSet / DataProviderClass. It is actually pretty simple and utilizes the getItemAt() and getLength() methods of the DataProviderClass (pseudo interface). Here is the code: //rs is a RecordSet object retrieved via FlashRemoting var len = rs.getLength(); var tmpObj; for(var i = 0; i < len; i++) { tmpObj = rs.getItemAt(i); trace("Field 1 : " + tmpObj.

Simple class that loads config files. You can view the documentation here. This is provided as is, but please post any errors, corrections or suggestions in the comments below. #include "stringUtils.as" /* Config.as v1.0 created by mike chambers : <A href="mailto:mesh@macromedia.com">mesh@macromedia.com</A> requires stringUtils.as which can be downloaded from: http://www.mikechambers.com/files/mesh/files/stringutils/ */ if (!String.stringUtilsDefined) { trace("Warning : The stringUtils.as file was not loaded. This library is required " + "by the Config.as file.

I don’t have much to post this morning, so I posted some ActionScript code that I created when I first started to play around with Flash MX. I have posted two things: Config.as - This is a class that can load and parse config files of various formats. stringUtils.as - This is a library that adds useful methods to the String object. Note, these are provided as is. Also, there is some weird stuff in there (look how I check that Config.

Simple library that adds useful methods to the String object. You can view the documentation here. This is provided as is, but please post any errors, corrections or suggestions in the comments below. Download here /*String Utility Component version 1.5 Mike Chambers thanks to Branden Hall, Ben Glazer, Christian Cantrell, Nik Schramm */ /* This allows user to check from other include files whether or not the stringUtils library has been included.