FlashLit.

One ActionScript Language Reference to rule them all

The Adobe Platform Docs team has released a beta version of the new combined version of the ActionScript Language Reference called the Adobe ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Flash Platform.

This reference documents the ActionScript packages and classes from Flash CS4, Flex 4 (Gumbo), Flash Player 10, AIR 1.5, ColdFusion 9, and LiveCycle Data Services 3. So if you use more than one of these products you no longer have to jump around from reference to reference. You can find it all in one place.

There is also some nifty filtering logic in place so you can hide content from products or runtimes you're not interested in. You can even step down to previous product versions.

This is still in beta, and there is a feedback link on the site, so please have a look and let the team know what you think.

Here's the official announcement from the Platform Docs blog too.

Use a Flex List control to navigate to URLs

This example shows how to display a list of links in a Flex List control and let the user click on the list items navigate to the links.

A friend of mine recently built a photo gallery application. She wanted to load an external list of URLs representing photo album pages, so she could change the URLs in the future without rebuilding the app. The following technique worked pretty well for her project.

The following code declares a set of links in XML, binds them to a Flex List control, and then opens up each linked page in a new browser window when the user clicks an item in the list.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" 
    layout="vertical" viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html">
    
    <mx:Style>
    .linkList
    {
        textDecoration: underline;
        color: #ddeef8; 
        rollOverColor: #99aabb;
        textRollOverColor: #eeeeff;
        selectionColor: #8899aa;
        textSelectedColor: #ffffff;
        textAlign: center;
        fontSize: 12;
        backgroundAlpha: 0;
    }
    </mx:Style>
    
    <mx:Script>
    <![CDATA[
          import mx.events.ListEvent;
          
          [Bindable]
          private var itemXml:XMLList = 
          <>
              <item label="Adobe.com" url="http://www.adobe.com" />
              <item label="FlashLit.com" url="http://www.flashlit.com" />
              <item label="FlexExamples.com" url="http://blog.flexexamples.com" />
          </>;
                      
          private function onItemClick(evt:ListEvent):void
          {
              var item:Object = (evt.target as List).selectedItem;
              if (item.@url)
              {
                  navigateToURL(new URLRequest(item.@url), '_blank');
              }
          }
    ]]>
    </mx:Script>
    
    <mx:List id="urlList" 
        labelField="@label"
        itemClick="onItemClick(event)" 
        width="150" 
        height="78"
        dataProvider="{itemXml}" 
        styleName="linkList"/>

</mx:Application>

The interesting bits:

• The links are declared in an XMLList variable. You can enhance this example pretty easily to grab the XML from an external file and use that to populate the list.
• The List control binds directly to the itemXml variable. If you want the List display will change automatically if the XML data changes, put the data into a XMLListCollection variable instead and bind to that.
• The List's itemClick event triggers the onItemClick() method. Note that even though it's listening for "itemClick" the handler method receives a ListEvent object, not an ItemClickEvent object.
• The onItemClick() method grabs the clicked item's url property using the E4X @ operator. Then it invokes the navigateToURL() method to open up that URL in a new browser window.
• The resulting control could be used in an HTML frameset to switch the content in another frame. Just change the value '_blank' in the navigateToURL() method to the name of the appropriate frame.

Here's the little control in action.

ActionScript 3.0 Coding Standards

As part of the open source release of the Adobe Flex 3 SDK, Adobe has also posted the ActionScript 3.0 Coding Conventions that the engineers used while developing the framework.

It's been hard to find a good set of AS3 coding standards in the past but this fits the bill. It's pretty thorough even though there are a few sections still marked TBD. It covers naming standards, language usage, file organization, and code formatting.

The standards all seem pretty reasonable too, unlike some other standards documents I've seen elsewhere. I'd say it's about a 95% match with my personal AS3 coding preferences.

Even if you don't agree with all the standards, this is a great starting point for any project team that's embarking on a big Flex, Flash, or ActionScript project. You can just use the Adobe standards as a baseline and tweak as necessary.