Question

I’m creating a flash campaign which will be loaded into a client’s framework, which I have no control over. The framework will already have loaded a few things such as locale, fonts and copy, and will pass these things to my swf upon initialization.

Since the size of my swf (let’s call it the shell) is restricted it will in turn display a campaign-specific preloader and then load another swf (let’s call this the campaign) with the rest of the site.

The shell and the campaign will both be PureMVC modules. The shell will create a few proxies and populate these with data passed from the framework (locale constants, fonts etc), before loading in the campaign.

When the campaign is loaded it too will need locale and fonts etc. so my question is, what is the best way to pass this data along to the campaign module from the shell module?

• I could create the same proxies in the campaign module and load the data again, which will be cached, but this obviously feels like the wrong way to go.

• I’ve investigated the use of the pipes utility but this seems like a bit of an overkill in my case since the communication will be one-way and will just happen once during the initialization of the campaign.

• Would it be “ok” from a design pattern point of view to pass the proxies to an init method of the campaign module and then register these proxies in the campaign module startup command? This seems wrong since these proxies have references to my shell application facade through notification names. Would it be ok if I move the notification names to some “NotificationConstants” class which both modules can use?

• I could create similar proxies in the campaign module but this time populate them with the data objects from my old proxies passed to the previously mentioned init method? Spontaneously this feels like the best way to do it since the data objects don’t have any references to my shell module but the “old” proxies do..

Answer 1

The solution I usually use is to create an interface:

interface Campaign {
    function set campaignDetails(value:CampaignDetails):void;

    //...
}

The campaign-module should implement this interface – in the implementation I recommend you to use a different proxy in the module, so that you would avoid having duplicated notifications and references.

When the shell is ready with the loading of the module it just has to:

if (module is Campaign)
{
    (module as Campaign).campaignDetails = ...;
}

I’m sure I’m telling you nothing new. You just need to make sure to keep the acquaintance between the shell and the module only on an interface level. Then you just pass the data and leave the module MVC core to deal with it independently from the shell.