Question

I need to create and read a user preferences XML file with Adobe Air. It will contain around 30 nodes.

<id>18981</id>
<firstrun>false</firstrun>
<background>green</background>
<username>stacker</username>
...

What’s a good method to do this?

Answer 1

Write up an “XML parser” that reads the values and is aware of the data types to convert to based on the “save preferences model.” So basically you write a method/class for writing the data from the “save preferences model” to XML then write a method/class for reading from the XML into the “save preferences model”, you can use describeType for both. Describe type will return an XML description of the model classes properties and the types of those properties and accessibility (read/write, readonly, write only). For all properties that are read/write you would store them into the XML output, when reading them back in you would do the same thing except you could use the type property from the describeType output to determine if you need to do a string to boolean conversion (if(boolValue == “true”)) and string to number conversions, parseInt or parseFloat. You could ultimately store the XML in a local SQL database if you want to keep history, or else just store the current preferences in flat file (using FileReference, or in AIR you can use FileStream to write directly to a location).

Edit:

Agree with Joshua’s comment below local shared objects was the first thing I thought of when seeing this, you can eliminate the need to write the XML parser/reader since it will handle serializing/de-serializing the objects for you (but manually looking at the LSO is probably ugly)… anyhow I had done something similar for another project of mine, I tried stripping out the relevant code, to note in my example here I didn’t use describe type but the general concept is the same:
http://shaunhusain.com/OnePageSaverLoader/index.php