ActionScript 3 reading XML tutorial

Flash tutorials
Tools: intermediate
Level: CS6 (CS3 to CS5)

This article or chapter is incomplete and its contents need further attention. Some information may be missing or may be wrong, spelling and grammar may have to be improved, use your judgment!

This article or section is a stub. It does not yet contain enough information to be considered a real article. In other words, it is a short or insufficient piece of information and requires additions.

Draft

Overview[edit | edit source]

Learning goals

The purpose of this tutorial is to show how to load XML data into Flash

Prerequisites: ActionScript 3 event handling tutorial; Flash ActionScript 3 overview
Moving on: Flash drag and drop tutorial; Flash games tutorial

The Flash tutorials index has a list of other tutorials.

Level and target population

It aims at Flash designers, not beginning ActionScript 3 programmers, although programmers can read this to get a feeling for object properties before digging into a real documentation like Adobe's Flash 9 reference manual. Also, some of the code should be rewritten a bit. I skipped type declarations on purpose and should even rip off more. These don't make sense for a few lines of code written by/for non-programmers. The goal is to keep code as simple as possible. I should at some point decide whether I should remove all type declarations from the examples or consistently leave the ones that might be useful in order to receive compiler warnings.

Quality: This text should technical people get going and may not be good enough for self-learning beginners. It can be used as handout in a "hands-on" class. That is what Daniel K. Schneider made it for...

The principle[edit | edit source]

Loading the DATA into a datastructure

  var data:XML = new XML();

  var xml_Loader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
  xml_Loader.load(new URLRequest("your_XML_file.xml"));

  // once that data is loaded, the event will be passed to the do_XML function
  xml_Loader.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, do_XML);

Use it

function doXML(e:Event):void {
  // data sits in the event's target (aka the load)'s data
  data = new XML(e.target.data);
  for (var i:int = 0; i<data.*.length(); i++){
  //.... do something here
  trace(data.*);
  };
}

Links[edit | edit source]

Thanx to Faisal Rasim

Tutorials

http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/
http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/flash/xml/ (AS2, not covered here)
http://www.republicofcode.com/tutorials/flash/as3xml/ (AS3)

Flash components that can read XML data

http://www.flashxml.net