Thumbleaf

EventCurb.as , removeAllListeners(object)

Thomas — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 02:51:38 +0000

In AS3 we can check if an object has listeners, as in: if( object.hasEventListener( type )).
But there is no method for getting all the listeners of an object. Or more importantly for removing all of them. Doh.

The hackish approach to this is to subclass EventDispatcher and write some short code that keeps a reference to each listener.

Which is what my class EventCurb does. – I should say it’s written overnight so anyone that likes can go ahead and try break their application…

Usage is as Singleton:

1	var _ev: EventCurb = EventCurb.getInstance();

To add listener:

1 2	_ev.addListener(obj, MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, someFunc); _ev.addListener(obj, MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, someFunc);

If you try to add the same listener twice you will get a trace telling you that listener is already added, and no addition occurs.

To get all listeners of an object:

1	_ev.getListeners(obj);

This returns an Array of all listeners assigned to object which can be traversed as arr[index].type, arr[index].listener.

To remove listener of object:

1 2	_ev.removeListener(obj, MouseEvent.MOUSE_DOWN, someFunc); _ev.removeListener(obj, MouseEvent.MOUSE_UP, someFunc);

And finally to remove All listeners of an object:

1	_ev.removeAllListeners(obj);

You can copy the class from below or download it from here. Feel free to rewrite or improve upon as you so wish.

EventCurb.as

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package
{
import flash.events.EventDispatcher;
import flash.utils.Dictionary;
/**
* ...
* @author Thomas James Thorstensson
* @version 1.0.1
*/
public class EventCurb extends EventDispatcher
{
private static var instance:EventCurb= new EventCurb();
private var objDict:Dictionary = new Dictionary(true);
private var _listener:Function;
private var objArr:Array;
private var obj:Object;

public function EventCurb() {
if( instance ) throw new Error( "Singleton and can only be accessed through Singleton.getInstance()" );
}

public static function getInstance():EventCurb {
return instance;
}

override public function addEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false, priority:int = 0, useWeakReference:Boolean = false):void
{
super.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference);
}

override public function removeEventListener(type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false):void
{
super.removeEventListener(type, listener, useCapture);
}

public function addListener(o:EventDispatcher, type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false, priority:int = 0, useWeakReference:Boolean = false):void {
// the object as key for an array of its event types
if (objDict[o] == null) objArr = objDict[o] = [];
for (var i:int = 0; i < objArr.length; i++) {
if ( objArr[i].type == type)
trace ("_______object already has this listener not adding!")
return
}
obj = { type:type, listener:listener }
objArr.push(obj);
o.addEventListener(type, listener, useCapture, priority, useWeakReference);
}

public function removeListener(o:EventDispatcher, type:String, listener:Function, useCapture:Boolean = false):void {
// if the object has listeners (ie exists in dictionary)
if (objDict[o] as Array !== null) {
var tmpArr:Array = [];
tmpArr = objDict[o] as Array;
for (var i:int = 0; i < tmpArr.length; i++) {
if (tmpArr[i].type == type) objArr.splice(i);
}

o.removeEventListener(type, listener, useCapture);
if (tmpArr.length == 0) {
delete objDict[o]
}
}else {
trace("_______object has no listeners");
}
}

/**
* If object has listeners, returns an Array which can be accessed
* as array[index].type,array[index].listeners
* @param o
* @return Array
*/
public function getListeners(o:EventDispatcher):Array{
if (objDict[o] as Array !== null) {
var tmpArr:Array = [];
tmpArr = objDict[o] as Array;
// forget trying to trace out the function name we use the function literal...
for (var i:int = 0; i < tmpArr.length; i++) {
trace("_______object " + o + " has event types: " + tmpArr[i].type +" with listener: " + tmpArr[i].listener);
}
return tmpArr

}else {
trace("_______object has no listeners");
return null
}

}

public function removeAllListeners(o:EventDispatcher, cap:Boolean = false):void {
if (objDict[o] as Array !== null) {
var tmpArr:Array = [];
tmpArr = objDict[o] as Array;
for (var i:int = 0; i < tmpArr.length; i++) {
o.removeEventListener(tmpArr[i].type, tmpArr[i].listener, cap);
}
for (var p:int = 0; p < tmpArr.length; p++) {
objArr.splice(p);
}

if (tmpArr.length == 0) {
delete objDict[o]
}
}else {
trace("_______object has no listeners");
}
}
}
}

Flash Builder 4 : vertical+horizontal centeringof swf in ActionScript projects

Thomas — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:28:30 +0000

It’s possible to edit the html wrapper that Flash Builder generates for the output swf – so that it centres any swf both horizontally and vertically without Flashbuilders default and slightly strange scaling.

The hack comes from how I’ve had this setup in Flashdevelop with SWFObject and only requires a few lines of CSS:

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>
#divFloat {
position:absolute;
top:50%;
left:50%;
right:50%;
bottom:50%;
margin:-300px; /* Half the height of your SWF*/
margin-left:-400px; /* Half the width of your SWF*/
}
>

To get this to work all that is needed is a div with the matching id ‘divFloat’ added to the html body of the html page that acts as a wrapper for the swf; and this will centre the swf vertically and horizontally.

Based on the CSS above we can device a similar approach and apply it to Flash Builder’s publishing method. The part to figure out is how to insert it into Flash Builders template based creation of the html wrapper.

To do so we must edit the index.template.html in the html-template folder in the Flash Builder project directory: which is the blueprint for the html file generated in the bin-debug folder.

In Flash Builder our html wrapper and swf will be based on what name we choose for our main application file (the one that initializes our application). This value is held by the variable ${application} in index.template.html. It is also the id of our embedded content in the html page that results in bin-debug, based on our index.template.

So we can write in index.template.html:

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>
body { margin: 0px;}
#${application} {
position:absolute;
top:50%;
left:50%;
right:50%;
bottom:50%;
margin:-300px; /* Half the height of your SWF*/
margin-left:-400px; /* Half the width of your SWF*/
}
>

If the application class has the name ‘OrangeApp.as’ that will translate into #OrangeApp{ in the resulting html file in the bin-debug folder and target the id of the embedded swf so that the CSS is applied to centre it.

Of course the swf still needs to have the following code in it’s application class:

1 2	stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT

Also specify the width and height of the swf in the index.template.html as usual by just replacing ‘width’ and ‘height’ with the real width and height of our swf. That will center html the swf in Flash Builder; and remove the pesky default ‘Flex scaling’ without too much work!

Formatting XML text with html tags +the TextFormat class

Thomas — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:21:03 +0000

Recently I wrongly came to the conclusion that you can’t apply a TextFormat to dynamic textfield set to htmlText = “My text” without that the TextFormat overwrites the formatting done with html tags in the XML.

It turns out that the issue I was having had more to do with not being read up on the defaultTextFormat setter.

Let us take Arial as an example. To embed it in AS3 in bold, italic, and normal formatting we would like so:

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package
{
import flash.display.*;
import flash.text.*;

/**
* ...
* @author Thomas James Thorstensson
*/
public class TextFmt extends Sprite
{

[Embed(source='C:/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf'
,fontFamily ='arialNormal'
,fontStyle ='normal' // normal|italic
,fontWeight ='normal' // normal|bold
,unicodeRange='U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E'
//,cff='false'
)]
public static const arialNormal:Class;

[Embed(source='C:/Windows/Fonts/arialbd.ttf'
,fontFamily ='arialBold'
,fontStyle ='normal' // normal|italic
,fontWeight ='bold' // normal|bold
,unicodeRange='U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E'
//,cff='false'
)]
public static const arialBold:Class;

[Embed(source='C:/Windows/Fonts/ariali.ttf'
,fontFamily ='arialItalic'
,fontStyle ='italic' // normal|italic
,fontWeight ='normal' // normal|bold
,unicodeRange='U+0020-U+002F,U+0030-U+0039,U+003A-U+0040,U+0041-U+005A,U+005B-U+0060,U+0061-U+007A,U+007B-U+007E'
//,cff='false'
)]
public static const arialItalic:Class;

public function TextFmt()
{
Font.registerFont(arialNormal);
Font.registerFont(arialBold);
Font.registerFont(arialItalic);
}

}
}

In our XML we can then directly refer to one of the versions of the font like so:

1	>Lorem ipsum face="arialItalic"> and some italic text> and end.>

If we set a dynamic textfield to the above content, we can still apply additional formatting to it
with a regular TextFormat as long as we use defaultTextFormat rather than setTextFormat :

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arialNormal = new TextFormat();
arialNormal.font = 'arialNormal';
arialNormal.size = 11;
arialNormal.color = 0xCCCCCC;
myText.defaultTextFormat = arialNormal;
myText.htmlText= xmlnode;

The dynamic textfield will take the ‘arialNormal’ format without the arialItalic format being overwritten. The italic style will so to speak take on the arialItalic and the arialNormal.

If we instead would use setTextFormat after myText.htmlText= xmlnode; it would be the case that the formatting in the html would be overwritten by the TextFormat.

Augmented reality, lab 1

Thomas — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 17:31:57 +0000

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Better late than never as I’ve began to delve into Augmented Reality.

There’s so much inspiring work going on in the AR community. The QT movie above is just a brief demo based on the start toolkit for FLAR over at http://saqoosha.net/en/flartoolkit/start-up-guide/ – slimmed down by me for Flashdevelop. The bitmap material is from Scuba’s latest album, Triangulation…

I’m currently looking at learning more about markers; and it’s been pointed out to me that there’s a useful marker generation tool here: http://flash.tarotaro.org/blog/2009/07/12/mgo2/.

-I aim to post more frequently now and will keep you updated on my digs.

New dubstep track written

Thomas — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:49:21 +0000

‘Bow’ listen @ http://www.myspace.com/thomasjamest

Papervision3D, FlashDevelop template

Thomas — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:22:55 +0000

Here’s a simple FlashDevelop template to speed up the creation of a 3D render in Papervision3D 2.0. Download the template from here or copy the code below and save it as View3D.as.fdt.

In FlashDevelop go to Tools –> Application files. This will open your Explorer: Now go into the folder Templates > ProjectFiles > AS3Project and drop the template in there.

You will now if you left click on your src package and go to Add > see the option ‘BasicView’ in the menu that pops up.

The custom arguments available for template creation are listed at http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/viewtopic.php?t=1521

Here’s the template:

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package $(Package) $(CSLB){

import flash.events.Event;
import org.papervision3d.view.BasicView;

public class $(FileName) extends BasicView {
$(EntryPoint)
/**
* $(FileName)
*/

public function $(FileName)():void {
init();
startRendering();
}

private function init():void {
}

override protected function onRenderTick(e:Event=null):void{
super.onRenderTick();
}

}
}

Lastly, a good set of templates can be found over at http://www.actionscriptdeveloper.co.uk/puremvc-first-thoughts-flashdevelop-templates/

Greensock v11

Thomas — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:59:57 +0000

The new Greensock engine is out and looking great performance wise! Check out the new features here. What the point of my below example is I don’t know but it runs smooth,

Papervision3D, interactive material

Thomas — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:12:20 +0000

With the aid of the Papervision3D class org.papervision3d.events.InteractiveScene3DEvent it’s easy to create an interactive papervision 3D primitive such as this Cube (click on it’s sides):

The cube uses the BitmapMaterial class (the sides are embedded jpg’s) and all we need to do to make them interactive is to remember to set interactive to true:

1 2	bitmapMaterial6.name = "6"; bitmapMaterial6.interactive = true;

Once we created our cube the last bit is just to add the event listener to the InteractiveScene3DEvent which is dispatched by the Cube. And we can use the event property evt.face3d.material.name of the current material side clicked to retrieve the name of the same:

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// create a cube based on the list
primitive = new Cube(materiallist, 400, 400, 400, 3, 3, 3);
primitive.addEventListener(InteractiveScene3DEvent.OBJECT_CLICK, handleClick);
//.../
private function handleClick (evt:InteractiveScene3DEvent) :void {
testText.text = "__side clicked : " +evt.face3d.material.name;
}

The InteractiveScene3DEvent is not limited to click events however, the documentation at http://papervision3d.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/as3/trunk/docs/org/papervision3d/events/InteractiveScene3DEvent.html – shows that we can also listen for MOVE, OVER, OUT, etc. Nice.

If you would like to get hold of the full code for this example then you can download it here (Flashdevelop project).

Theres some great Papervision tutorials over at http://www.madvertices.com where I’ve taken several myself!

AS 3 Dictionary Object: a way to map instances of sealed Classes

Thomas — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:28:05 +0000

In Action Script 3 most classes are sealed. This means that for most Objects we are not able to create new properties run time beyond those that where available compile time. This is not the case with Array and Object though which are both dynamic and regularly come in handy to us for example in the creation of an associative array (or sometimes called a ‘hash’) :

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var myAssoc:Object = new Object();
myAssoc["oranges"] = 101;
trace ("number of oranges " + myAssoc["oranges"])

But what to do if you’re in need of creating properties upon an instance that belongs to a sealed class. For example say that we with flash.display.SimpleButton would like to add the property counter which tells us how what time interval to start a timer with. We could not:

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(//import flash.display.SimpleButton etc...)
var myBtn:Simple Button = new SimpleButton();
myBtn.timestamp = 1000;

The above would throw an error as SimpleButton like most classes in ActionScript 3 are sealed. The solution would be to extend SimpleButton with a dynamic class like so :

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package
{
import flash.display.SimpleButton;
public dynamic class DynamicButton extends SimpleButton
{
public function DynamicButton()
{

}
}
}

Making use of our dynamic button we could now :

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var dynBtn:DynamicButton = new DynamicButton();
dynBtn.timestamp = 1000;
trace ("dynamic button timestamp value " + dynBtn.timestamp);

And this would compile without errors and work nicely. However there is an other approach to this which comes very handy as a way of creating dynamic properties and referring to them. Here enters the Dictionary Object. This object is a bit like our associative array above but with the big difference that it can take an object itself as lookup key to find a value. For our oranges we get:

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var dict:Dictionary = new Dictionary();
var myOrange:Object = new Object();
dict[myOrange] = 101;
trace ("number of oranges dictionary approach " + dict[myOrange]);

Using a Dictionary Object we thus have a way to lookup properties using the objects themselwes rather than using the variable names to refer to properties. This also works for instances of sealed classes such as our button example. We can write:

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dict = new Dictionary();
var myButton: SimpleButton = new SimpleButton ();
dict[myButton] = 1001;
trace ("dictionary button counter value " + dict[myButton]);

Since the button is the key, it does not matter that SimpleButton is a sealed class. We are not trying to assign a new property to the SimpleButton instance by using a variable name. Instead we use the instance itself and thus we here have a handy way of assigning values also to instances that don’t take new dynamic properties.

Some further readings:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2006/07/as3_dictionary.html
http://www.zombieflambe.com/actionscript-3/as3-dictionary-class-array-object-benchmark/
http://pixelwelders.com/blog/best-practices/2008/speed-tests-objects-vs-arrays-vs-dictionaries/