The hard-working, unstoppable Meister Wanja came to me with the following problem involving getDefinitionByName and interfaces. Say you have the following class: package { import flash.display.Sprite; import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName; public class Blah extends Sprite { public function Blah() { var ref : String = “YourMama”; var ClassRef : Class = getDefinitionByName( ref ) as Class; var [...]

The project I’m currently working on needs to load large amounts of data. The application uses data which is supplied to us in the form of Excel sheets. The data for one object consists of 4500 records. XML files are typically used for this kind of task. However in this case the XML files are [...]

In a previous post I talked about an easy deep cloning method I found and which I tweaked a little. While I was crammed in the tube yesterday (sometimes the best ideas are born in the underground) I came up with an idea to simplify and generalise this even further. The problem with the current [...]

UPDATE: I’ve made this made more flexible. Read this. I stumbled upon this method via the ActionScript 3 Design patterns blog. This method is commonly used in Java to make a deep copy of an object. I tried the example but couldn’t get it to work. When I casted bytes.readObject() it always returned null. I [...]

I highly recommend this debugger. It is an AIR application that has many useful features and will make your life much easier. Some of those features are: detailed traces (trace strings and objects, which you can expand) edit properties at runtime method testing a tree structure with which you can walk through the application On [...]

This gave me a headache! This error occurred when I was trying to compile 38 separate ActionScript classes into SWF files: OutOfMemory error:PermGen Space If you search for this error you’ll find many blogposts written by utterly frustrated Java developers. It appears to be a dreaded error that is raised when deploying war files to [...]

I came across this error during an automated build on the server: Error: An error occurred because there is no graphics environment available. Please set the headless-server setting in the Flex configuration file to true. This happens when the server isn’t hooked up to a monitor, mouse, keyboard, etc. The flex-config.xml file needs to be [...]

Some Flex components have visual elements that cannot be controlled with CSS. Have you ever tried removing the border of a Button or the roll over background color of a LinkButton? I had this problem a few times before and the solution to this is very simple. Just reset the skin .myButtonStyle { skin: ClassReference(“mx.skins.ProgrammaticSkin”); [...]

I got this runtime error when trying out the new 3D features in the latest Flex SDK: VerifyError: Error #1014: Class flash.geom::PerspectiveProjection could not be found. This can be fixed this by setting the Flash Player version to 10.0.0 (or whatever fp10 version you’re using) in Properties > ActionScript Compiler > HTML Wrapper > Require [...]

I encountered this problem when implementing a workaround for the multiline unicode text wrapping bug. I use newline characters (“\n”) to break up the text manually. When I load the XML file and parse it in my Flex app, newline characters are displayed in the text field. Tracing out the string displays “\n” and not [...]