Eat The Cheeseburger, Astroboy!

Adobe has a great feature that gives a developer the ability to easily and cleanly embed movieclip assets created in Flash CS3 Authoring Environment for use in Eclipse Flex/ActionScript projects. In older versions of Flash, a MovieClip could have a Linkage ID for access in your code. But now in CS3, the Linkage ID is now two parameters. The first is a qualifed class name that will act as a wrapper for your clip. The second is a base class that this clip should inherit from. What this gives you is the ability in an Flex or ActionScript Project to reference these “assets” as a class. No messy importing or dynamic loading from a SWF file.

1. In the Flash CS3 Authoring Enviroment, right click on your clip in your library and click “Linkage : Export for ActionScript” The “Class” and “Base Class” options will now be available. I usually name my classes something along the lines of “com.krisrange.assets.navigation.ButtonAsset”. This helps in organization of your assest in Eclipse.
2. Go to “File -> Publish Settings -> Flash” and select the “Export SWC” option.
3. Now publish your Flash file and copy the corresponding *.swc file to your Eclipse project “libs” directory ( if you are using Flex 3 ) or add the swc to your Eclipse project Library Path.
4. Open up a class, and use like any other class you want to import.

   import com.krisrange.assets.navigation.ButtonAsset;
   
   function setup() : void
   {
   	var button : ButtonAsset = new ButtonAsset();
   	addChild( button );
   }

First post! As a first post, I’ve decided to share my experiences from last winter using XML namespaces. At the time I thought I was just delerious from the insane work hours, but atleast now I know it wasn’t me! There are really just two basic but important things to note about using them.

1. If you are using a Namespace in your XML data, you must set the current namespace in your code. An example I use is

   var ns : Namespace = new Namespace( dataModel.getNamespace() );
   default xml namespace = ns;

2. When you set the namespace and expect to resuse it later in your class, make sure the first instance of the namespace is higher up in your code than any other usage. Setting it below a different function that needs to access the data will return blank results. Even if the function is executed afterwards!! Using a Namespace ( Besides the fact that this code doesn’t grab a “real” xml source ) like this will not work and will return a blank result:

   public class NamespaceTest extends Sprite
   {
   	/** Namespace */
   	private var ns : Namespace;
   
   	/** Constructor */
   	public function NamespaceTest() : void
   	{
   		create();
   		arrange();
   	}
   
   	/** Arrange me, gets called AFTER create() */
   	private function arrange() : void
   	{
   		// Nothing returned
   		trace( dataModel.getXML()..layout.@x );
   	}
   
   	/** Create me, called first */
   	private function create() : void
   	{
   		ns = new Namespace( dataModel.getNamespace() );
   		default xml namespace = ns;
   	}
   }