Question

I am relatively new to ActionScript (have started with it 2 months ago), and have a little doubt of ‘procedure’ or ‘technique’ related to passing information between objects.

I have made a class that Pops-up a window that contains a panel with a textbox and two buttons, one for accepting, other for cancelling. It should work as a prompt in which you enter some text, and then if you like the changes, you accept, else, you cancel and the text you entered is discarded.

The thing I’m not sure how to handle is how to receive the text, once the user presses ‘Accept’, from the class I want to receive it from.

So, the approach I took is a bit cumbersome: firstly, when launching the popup, I associate with it a function (called onResult() in the code) from the ‘class that launches’, which will be called after the user presses the ‘Accept’ or ‘Cancel’ buttons; secondly, to get the text that the user inserted in the box, I keep a reference to it public from my class.

Please have a look at the code here:
http://pastebin.com/Kmud8rBe

I’ve also programmed in Android before, and the approach there would be much cleanier, just putting the text result from the popup inside a bundle inside an intent, and receiving it from the launched class. Here, I have to pass functions and such, which I don’t like at all (although it works!).

So, my question is, for you ActionScript gurus out there, how would you approach this?

Thanks and regards!

pepillo

Answer 1

good that you created a class for your popup-functionality but why did you make all functions static? normal class with normal methods would be better … and let the class extend from Sprite so that you can add the instance right to the stage.

package
{
    import flash.display.Sprite;

    public class Popup extends Sprite
    {
        public function Popup (label:String)
        {
           // add text and buttons ...
        }
    }
}

then you can just say:

var pop:Popup = new Popup("message");
addChild(pop);

and to get the data back after the popup is closed you would do sth like this:

private function onPressedAccept(event:MouseEvent):void
{
    var text:String = _label.text;

    // dispatch a custom event which saves the text as its data
    dispatchEvent(new MyEvent(MyEvent.ACCEPT, text));

    // close popup ...
    parent.removeChild(this);

    // or you would remove the popup in the ACCEPT eventlistener ...
}

listening for accept/cancel:

var pop:Popup = new Popup("message");
addChild(pop);

// add eventlistener
popup.addEventListener(MyEvent.ACCEPT, onAccept);
popup.addEventListener(MyEvent.CANCEL, onCancel);

private function onAccept(event:MyEvent):void
{
   trace(event.data);
}

link about creating custom events:
http://www.8bitrocket.com/2007/7/31/Creating-Custom-Events-In-Flash-AS3-ActionScript-3/