Question

I am a Java programmer and need to work on a Flex/ActionScript project right now. I got an example of using ITreeDataDesriptor from Flex 3 Cookbook, but there is one line of actionscript code that’s hard for me to understand. I appreciate if someone could explain this a little further.

public function getData(node:Object, model:Object=null):Object     {         if (node is Office) {             return {children:{label:node.name, label:node.address}};         }     } 

The part that I didn’t understand was ‘{children:{label:node.name, label:node.address}}’. Office is simply a value object that contains two String properties: name and address.

Answer 1

The following return expression (modified from the question) …

return {children:{label:node.name, body:node.address}} 

… is functionally equivalent to this code …

var obj:Object = new Object(); obj.children = new Object(); obj.children.label = node.name; obj.children.body = node.address; return obj; 

The anonymous object returned in the question code complicates matters because it defines a property twice. In that case, the first declaration is used, and the subsequent one(s) are ignored. No compile-time or runtime error is thrown.