Flex/AIR Tips: Keyboard Codes

Daniel — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:40:22 +0000

If you ever have the urge to capture a specific key pressed in Flex or AS3 in general, there is an excellent list of the keycodes, and costants you can use to represent them in your code here: http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/ui/Keyboard.html

You can use them statically(without instantiating an object) like so:

trace(Keyboard.TAB); // 9

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Flex: getType() schmettype

Daniel — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 00:31:54 +0000

I’ve started dabbling in Flex recently, and something that was apparent(and annoying at times) to me early on was it’s strongly-typed nature. Not type as in a keyboard, but variable types. Flex cares very much whether your variable is an Array, or ArrayCollection as it’s knowledge of types is key to it’s processing. This is quite the converse to a language like PHP, which is loosely-typed to say the least.

Anyway, I came upon a case where I needed to know the type a variable was so I could cast it properly(and for debugging), and I found that Flex doesn’t have a function to simply return a variable’s type. There is describeType(), but this returns an XML object with all of the information about the variable — not just the type. Plus you have to import the proper class to use it. So, I threw together this function quickly that will perform the import, and return/alert the type as needed:

private function getType(value:*, alert:Boolean = false):String
{
	import flash.utils.*;
	var description:XML = describeType(value);
	if(alert)
		Alert.show(description[0].@name);
	return description[0].@name;
}

I hope someone else can find it useful.

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Flex/AIR Tips: Keyboard Codes

Flex: getType() schmettype