ActionScript 3 reading XML tutorial

Draft

Overview

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

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

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