Question

what i’m trying to do is walk an object that is also a complex tree of objects and output the actionscript 3 code it took (or takes) to create instantiate and populate that object and all its children.

so for instance if you saw something like this in your debugger

myObjectToParse (ParseMe@173e239)
----------[0]someBlob (SomeBlob@173e322)|null
----------[1]someChildren (Array@173e239)
--------------------[0]childFoo (ChildFoo@123e239)
------------------------------someProperty (Number@173e239) | 45
------------------------------someOtherProperty (Number@173e239) | 45
--------------------[1]childBar (ChildFoo@123e239)
------------------------------someStringProperty(String@173e239) | "hello world"

The exporter would spit out:

public class MySerialized extends ParseMe
{
    public var someBlob:SomeBlob;
    public var someChildren:Array;

    public function MySerialized()
    {
        //populateSomeBlob(); //its null so the export doesn't write it out    
        populateSomeChildren();    
    }

    private function populateSomeChildren()
    {
        someChildren=new Array(2);
        var childFoo:ChildFoo=new ChildFoo();
        childFoo.someProperty=45;
        childFoo.someOtherProperty=45;
        childFoo.someProperty=45;
        childFoo.someOtherProperty=45;

        var childBar=new ChildBar();
        childBar.someStringProperty="hello world";

        someChildren[0]=childFoo;
        someChildren[1]=childBar;
    }
}

Any tips? Ideas? Thanks!

Edit: I think i may end up just trying to serialize to an amf ByteArray…sounds simpler, but i haven’t played with and don’t know how many levels deep it can go and what types of references it supports.

Answer 1

in general, this is not possible, i am afraid … for example, you have readonly properties … also, some classes’ constructor expects initialization values (although i personally think this is not very clever in most cases, but ok) … also, some objects may be instances of private/internal classes, so the generated instantiation code will throw errors …

you can however make a solution for objects, that do not have these problems …

ok, basically, flash.utils.describeType will be of a lot of help … that’ll give you all the fields of an object (also tell you, whether it has read only fields etc.), as well as the class name …

this will help you iterating through an objects properties … for dynamic objects (describeType will tell you), you will additionaly have to loop over the properties using for-in loops … use * as type for the iteration variable, that way it’ll also work with Dictionarys for example …

then you need to treat specific built-in types specially …

• XML: use XML::toXMLString … this’ll give you the base for an XML literal …
• Array: loop through it, and build an array literal
• Number,int,uint,Boolean: use the standard string representation for a literal
• String: remember to escape the string (newlines, backslashes etc.) … easiest would be "unescape('"+escape(yourStringValue)+"');" … you can of course create a normal String literal with escape sequences … simplest way would be com.adobe.serialization.JSON.serialize(yourStringValue) (using as3corelib)
• Date: use something like "new Date("+yourDateValue.getTime()+");" … although it is questionable, whether it really makes sense to harcode dates …
• DisplayObject and subclasses: this will not be trivial, if you really want that … you will need to find a way to properly rebuild the display list hierarchy …
• IEventDispatcher and implementors: this is quite impossible … there is no way to find out the handlers registered to a IEventDispatcher, plus you’ll be having a hard time generating ActionScript from function objects (quite impossible) …
  you will have to choose a recursive approach … please note that if you want to support circular references, this’ll be more difficult … you might wanna take that decision before you design your algorithm …

hope this helps …

greetz

back2dos