Question

I am making a simple debugger window in ActionScript for myself where I can add and remove variables I want to track. I was to be able to add variables to the list by just doing something like

DebuggerMonitor.trackVar(variable).

My question is, is there any way I can turn “variable” itself (the name, not the value) into a String to be added into a text field?

Answer 1

Depending on how “intelligent” your debugger should be, you could just pass the name along:

DebuggerMonitor.trackVar( variable, "variable" );  

since obviously, when used in a context like this, the name should be known at the time you are writing the program.

You can also do some reflection magic to get instance variable names, but it won’t work for temp variables (their names are dropped at compilation time):

public function getVariableName( instance:*, match:* ):String {
    var typeDescription:XML = describeType( instance );
    var variables:XMLList = typeDescription..variable;
    var accessors:XMLList = typeDescription..accessor;
    for each(var variable:XML in variables) 
        if(matchesXMLName( instance, variable, match )) 
            return variable.@name;
    for each(var accessor:XML in accessors) 
        if(matchesXMLName( instance, accessor, match )) 
            return accessor.@name;
    return "No name found.";
}

private function matchesXMLName( instance:*, xml:XML, match:* ):Boolean {
    return match == instance[[e-mail]()];
}

var varName:String = getVariableName ( myObject, variable );

Using reflections like this will also be quite costly, if used often – you will have to think of a way to cache the type descriptions.

I recommend you check out the as3commons reflections package – there is a lot of useful functionality in there…