Creating Macromedia Flash Actionscript Objects and why to use them

posted: 07-09-05
author: PrimeVector
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Creating Macromedia Flash Actionscript Objects and why to use them

Objects in actionscript are ways for us as developers to wrap our data into tight little packages ready for usage. Talk isnt much so lets give you an example of how objects can be used to pack a lot of data into a container that is easilly accessible. Lets say we had a list of users and we want to have a bit of data stored relating to that users. If you are using objects you could go about it thisway:

First we create the objects for the specific users and assigns 3 variables to each of them to store some information on that user. {} means "create a new instance of the Object class" To add a variable to an object just set it up like myObjectName.myVariableName

var user_1 = {};
user_1.username = "Chilly";
user_1.age = "37";
user_1.country = "United States";

As you can see we added 3 variables each describing something specific related to user_1. When we use object user_1 we now know that we have acces to all that information. Lets make 2 other user objects.

var user_2 = {};
user_2.username = "Erwin";
user_2.age = "27";
user_2.country = "Netherlands";

var user_3 = {};
user_3.username = "Janice";
user_3.age = "20";
user_3.country = "Australia";

Now for the fun of it lets create an array and push the user objects into this array for even more easy access. [] means "create a new instance of the Array class", so it creates a new empty array for us. Because we put all our variables in the object containers we just have to push those objects into the array. All the variables will be made available as i will show you in the "for" loop. If we setup a for loop we can loop through these user object we have created and trace the variables we want to. If you dont know anything about for loops you can read more about it here and here

userObjectsArray = [];
userObjectsArray.push(user_1);
userObjectsArray.push(user_2);
userObjectsArray.push(user_3);

Now we will setup a loop that first checks how many items there are in the userObjectsArray by checking its length property. This will return 3 because we pushed 3 objects into this array. Then variable i is incremented by 1 each iteration until it reaches 3. < means "if smaller then"

for(var i=0; i<userObjectsArray.length; i++){
     //lets say we want to get all the usernames
     trace(userObjectsArray[i].username);
     //or all the ages
     trace(userObjectsArray[i].age);
     //or perhaps all the countries
     trace(userObjectsArray[i].country);
     trace("----------------------------------------------");
}

I hope you can see the advantages of using objects in your codes, they will help to organise your code into a neat bundle, with all data easilly available.

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