web developer, usability, analytics

This is something I wasn’t aware that you could do in a switch/case statement until recently.  A lot of times developers will handle this with nested if/else statements.

For Example:

var myNum:Number = 7;
 
switch (true)
{
  case (myNum < 5):
  trace ("< 5")
break;
 
case (myNum > 5):
  trace ("> 5")
  break;
}

Using switch (true)/switch (false) is pretty cool. You can use it for any sort of true/false comparisons, including comparing strings. The first one to evaluate true will trip the statement.

There are two methods that I have found for for doing this. (Essentially the same thing, just depends on your coding style and how you want to keep things organized.)

Method 1:

  Embed XML (8.9 KiB, 135 hits)

package  {
 
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.utils.ByteArray;
 
	public class EmbedXML extends MovieClip {
 
		[Embed(source="my.xml", mimeType="application/octet-stream")] 
		protected const EmbeddedXML:Class;
		private var _xml:XML;
 
		public function EmbedXML():void  {
			addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init, false, 0, true);
		}
 
		private function init(e:Event):void {
			//_xml = XML(new EmbeddedXML());
 
			var contentfile:ByteArray = new EmbeddedXML();
			var contentstr:String = contentfile.readUTFBytes( contentfile.length );
			_xml =  new XML( contentstr );
			trace(_xml);
		}
	}
}

Method 2:

  Embed XML Class (8.9 KiB, 103 hits)

//.as file that you embed the xml in
package {
	import flash.utils.ByteArray;
 
	[Embed(source="my.xml",mimeType="application/octet-stream")]
 
	public class MyXML extends ByteArray {
 
		public function MyXML():void {	}
	}
}
//usage:
package  {
 
	import flash.events.Event;
	import flash.display.MovieClip;
	import flash.utils.ByteArray;
 
	public class EmbedXMLTwo extends MovieClip {
 
		private var _xml:XML;
 
		public function EmbedXMLTwo():void  {
			addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, init, false, 0, true);
		}
 
		private function init(e:Event):void {
			//var myxml:MyXML = new MyXML();
			//_xml = XML (myxml);
 
			var contentfile:ByteArray = new MyXML();
			var contentstr:String = contentfile.readUTFBytes( contentfile.length );
			_xml =  new XML( contentstr );
			trace(_xml);
		}	
	}
}

For a project I was on awhile ago, I needed to decorate a character with different items of clothing. When the user was done ‘dressing’ their character, they would press a button and the whole character would shrink down so it would fit as an ornament on a tree. In order to not confuse the issue, I am going to only show the code that enables you to take a movieclip and create a png from it. In order to do this, you will need to include the Flex SDK as a part of your flash build (for the Base64Encoder class) and you need to download as3corelib. To include the Flex SDK, in your Flash preferences add this line: (Mac OSX)

//VERSION will prob be 3.5, 4 etc...
/Applications/Adobe Flash Builder 4/sdks/flex_sdk_VERSION/frameworks/projects/framework/src

Code after the jump…

  CreatePNG (44.4 KiB, 173 hits)

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Twitter limits the amount of calls you can make to its API and from one IP to a few hundred an hour. So that means if you have something on the page that is showing your latest tweets, it will only work for the first few hundred people. We have a really high traffic site and needed a more robust solution.

What we did is create a php file that loads the XML from the twitter user timeline (example) and saves it on our server. We setup a chron job to call it every minute. The Flash movie loads the XML file that our php file creates for us ensuring that we will never go over the limit but always have the most up to date content from Twitter displayed on our website.

If you have any questions or want an example of the source, post in the comments. Running Example.

Resources Used:

This is building off my previous post and adding a scrollbar to the textfield if there are too may tweets to fit in it. You don’t need to load data from a HTTPService but this is helpful for loading data when you don’t know its length ahead of time.

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