Comments on: AS3 E4X Rundown

By: bostown03

bostown03 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:52:17 +0000

This article is the shiznit!

By: Borek

Borek — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:08:07 +0000

Excellent article, maybe you could just add that the curly braces syntax will work only if the double quotes are missing, i.e. this will work:

while this will not:

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:35:35 +0000

Is there a way to use a wildcard filter with a string to filter a title by a single word. So for example, I want to display only the titles that have the word “Flash” in them.

I created a video player that feeds off the RSS of my blip.tv channel. I can get all the titles and videos but I want to create a custom video player that will only show the videos that have the word “flash” in the title.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 06:58:46 +0000

This line::

“The variable is already associated with the root node so there?s no need to write into the expression. ”

just put an end to my 2 hour headache while dealing with converting old AS2 xml into my current Flex 3 Cairngorm project.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. :- )

— Now. I iz a pimp.

By: Shawny

Shawny — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 00:19:09 +0000

Great post. So I got this idea last night to use an e4x expression as the source of a chart and advanceddatagrid dataProvider. I’ve found that mostly all of the “examples” online and in all the books only look at one or(at most) two nesting levels inside of an xml document. Unfortunately, my needs go beyond showing the number of apples or names of people in a contact list. So here’s some background:

I have xml that is segregated in different levels, with the first level being a generic role and the second level being one of a type. There can be many different roles and many number of types under each role. Within each type is a list of datapoints that correspond to the specific role and type.

So last night I was playing around and was able to get my adg to treat an e4x expression as the source by passing comparison values to the attributes which in turn only loaded the data items of interest. My e4x expression was sorta like this:

I got this to work a couple of times but the dataProvider was not being modified once the values of the typeValue and roleValue changed. So, like an idiot, I started hacking around trying to treat my e4x expression as a solid data provider and it has since stopped working altogether. If Im really nice, and standing in just the right point of the room, I can get the dataProvider to load initially but ONLY for a single attribute comparison ie myColl..role.(@id==someRoleValue) but not for another level into the structure.

Any words of wisdom would be GREAT at this point. I want to use the XML (or XMLListCollection if need be) as a dataProvider for my charts and datagrid, but since I want to filter the values based upon parent nodes (and be able to filter my data dynamically). I’ve made this work with arrayCollections but I dont want to have to redo my webservices to provide me with flat data just to get this to work. I would think this is the VERY reason for e4x…besides acting as xml processing shorthand :D

By: Marcela E.

Marcela E. — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:22:38 +0000

Brendan,
I too was looking for a way to sum numeric data and was able to figure this out by looking at a few other e4x examples:

var sum:Number = 0;
xml.person.age.(sum += Number(valueOf()));
trace(”Sum of ages:”, sum);

Hope this comment finds you before you drive yourself crazy (or resort to a for…loop).

By: Brendan D.

Brendan D. — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:04:51 +0000

I’m looking for a way to sum the numeric data in like nodes. Using your XML in the example, I want to create an XMLList for the Age nodes using thePeople..age and then add the two results together. ie: 27+26=53

By: Adobe Actionscript 3.0 E4X |

Adobe Actionscript 3.0 E4X | — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:21:50 +0000

[...] not really taken that big step to form the way as2 talkes to XML to E4X. I started my reserch on dispatchevent.org then I viewed the E4X video from Mark Birat the Adobe MAX sessions and it helped put my research [...]

By: simplychaos

simplychaos — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:44:24 +0000

There actually is a nextSibling, parent, etc… but it’s on the XMLNode object. This make sense, because XMLList seems to be just a way to break XML into smaller chunks for processing, so they’re isolated objects. Each XMLNode however, has: parentNode, nextSibling, previousSibling, firstChild, lastChild, childNodes, and attributes.

Good post, but needs some proof-reading for technical accuracy. I think you understand how it all works, but the written explanations aren’t always consistent.

By: Brian Hancock

Brian Hancock — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 06:30:27 +0000

Thanks for the article.
I am a little confused about the return type when filtering using either the square brackets indexed array notation or the the parenthetical predicates. For example
if I use
var obj:Object = thePeople.person.age[0] ;
I can see in the debugger that obj is typed as an XMLList with one XML element, and if I check the toXMLString() method on that XML node it displays “27″
But if I use
var obj:Object = thePeople.person.age[0].text() ;
it similarly returns an XMLList with one XML element but the toXMLString now just shows “27″
Although the value is what I expect, I do not see how the value “27″ can be considered an XML document or node as it does not have a root element.
This led me to try
var x:XML = XML(29) ;
and it was quite happy about this.
It seems AS3’s definition of an XML document is a little more inclusive than I expected

Brian

By: Catherine Tuttle

Catherine Tuttle — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:00:13 +0000

Thank you for this article. It is the best I’ve seen. I’ll be back with questions.

By: TG

TG — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 21:52:27 +0000

Great article, thank you!

however, I still can?t understand how to use e4x to filter out dates.
I have the following XML

then I?m trying to put the upcoming dates in one DataGrid and the past in another, but it doesn?t seems to compare properly the date field.

public var today:Date = new Date();
]]>

any ideas?

By: Monokai » Blog Archive » Flash SEO: graceful degradation to add meaning and structure

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 08:33:11 +0000

[...] Actionscript 3 E4X rundown Using E4X with XHTML? Watch your namespaces! [...]

By: Renato

Renato — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 01:01:51 +0000

I am new to Flex and e4x and have been struggling for weeks to find the right way to filter my xml based on two variables, that are set by two comboBox.
One comboBox defines the language the user wants to read the info. The other defines the product it wants information.

var selectedProduct (used to filter the attribute)
var languageSelected (used to filter the child node, based on the selection of the attribute)

Follows an example of the structure I am playing with:

0
Tennis ball
Our products are etc,etc etc…
Nossos produtos sao etc, etc, etc

1
Jogging shoes
Our products are etc,etc etc…
Nossos produtos sao etc, etc, etc

So for example, if the user selects the prodX1 and the language is PT (portuguese) I should read “Nossos produtos sao etc, etc, etc”.

Any ideas how to solve it? Thanks in advance….

By: iGman

iGman — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 09:10:34 +0000

thePeople.length() // 1