About six months ago we had some convoluted way of doing something on the backend (PHP), and in order to get something back I was give an single object with a ton of properties and I had to loop over them. For the life of me I couldn’t find any snippets of code that let me loop through an objects properties and get the actual key names… its very simple to loop through an object and get the values, thats cake…. but I was like… hmmm how do I get the key names?

So I came across Dictionary, which I always thought was just an expansion of Object, and I could never really figure out what it did that object didn’t except for the fact that as3coreLib has a Dictionary Utility class that makes it so you can loop over an object and get the keys, and its a light weight .swc file, so I used it up, and started using dictionaries for that reason, and haven’t used Generic Objects ever since, because I figured they did the same thing except Dictionary classes gave me the ability to loop through them and get the keys….

The other day I ran across some code, and thought to myself, so I use a DictionaryUtility class, why didn’t I ever think to even look through the ObjectUtil class in as3… so anyway…. there is a function in that class called getClassInfo, that will give you an array of the properties back… I felt pretty stupid after that, but needless to say I found another way to make my life easier coding….

here is a really small snippet.

var classInfoProperties:Array = ObjectUtil.getClassInfo(a[0]).properties as Array;

To use email with ant you need the following 3 jar files installed.

• ant-javamail.jar
• activation.jar
• mail.jar

After you download the files you need to put them into your ant directory under your eclipse install “/plugins/org.apache.ant_******/ folder. If you watch the video, I explain how to find the ant folder if you don’t know where it is. For me it is “C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.7.0.v200706080842\lib”. That is where all the ant jar files are held. You need to put the jar’s you downloaded into that folder, and then in eclipse you need to do the following.

1. Window > Preferences > (on left tree) Ant > Runtime
2. Once you’ve clicked on “Runtime” you’ll see a tree in the right side and the first entry should say “Ant Home Entries(Default) you need to click that, and then all of the buttons on the right will become enabled to click on
3. click on “Add External JARs
4. browse to your ant directory where all the jars are (for me its C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.7.0.v200706080842\lib)
5. highlight your jar files that you downloaded and click ok (ant-javamail.jar,activation.jar,mail.jar)
6. click apply
7. restart flex builder or eclipse (whichever you are using)

Now we are finally ready to get into the ANT part…

Start by going into whatever flex project you want (or creating one) and then create two files under the root.

project.properties
##### EMAIL PROPERTIES #####
email.server = smtp.gmail.com
email.ssl = true
email.user = someemail@gmail.com
email.from = someemail@gmail.com
email.password = myReallyStrongPassword
email.to = someemail@gmail.com
email.port = 465

##### ZIP PROPERTIES #####
zip.destinationFile = E:/fb3Workspace/TempPublish/${zip.filename}.zip
zip.filename = src-code
zip.dir = E:/fb3Workspace/TempPublish/src


Build.xml
<project name="Publishing your project via Email with ANT">

<target name="zip-project">
<zip destfile="${zip.destinationFile}" duplicate="preserve">
<zipfileset dir="${zip.dir}" />
</zip>
</target>
</project>

Please see the video for more detail.

Pushing your project via Email with ANT (takes a little bit to load)

NOTE:Please note that the zip format allows multiple files of the same fully-qualified name to exist within a single archive. This has been documented as causing various problems for unsuspecting users. If you wish to avoid this behavior you must set the duplicate attribute to a value other than its default, “add”. (zip tag documentation)

Links:

• zip tag documentation

The Problem

When you create an air app and host it on a server somewhere, you often times have updates, and you need to publish a new .air file to the server so people that continue to download your app, get the newest, healthiest version. The problem with that is that after bug fix (which may take all of 2 minutes), you need to connect to your ftp site, or ssh, or email the new file to yourself, remote desktop into the server, and check your email and put the new file into it’s correct path on the server.

The Solution

Create an ANT Script that logs into you ftp site, and uploads the new files, and it goes from a some what menacing task, to being a delightful 2 or 3 click deployment. There are some things you have to do to eclipse to get the ftp tag to work right in ANT… They are listed below in the steps to take to get ANT up and going in eclipse or flexbuilder.

ftp.username = username
ftp.password = password
ftp.dir = dirToUploadFilesTo
ftp.server = myDomain.com
ftp.localDir = E:/ClickStats_Basketball_1_0/update

<target name="ftp-push-to-server">
<echo>Pushing files to ftp site: ${ftp.server}</echo>
<ftp
server = "${ftp.server}"
userid = "${ftp.username}"
password = "${ftp.password}"
action = "put"
remotedir = "${ftp.dir}"
verbose = "true"
>
<fileset id="ftp.upload.fileset" dir="${ftp.localDir}" />
</ftp>
</target>

The Video

Prerequisite: /using-the-air-update-framework

Your going to need to do a few things to make sure ant is working:

1. follow the steps on adobe’s site
2. once ant is installed (how to is in the previous link) you then need to make sure you have at least java 6 installed
3. now in eclipse or flexbuilder open your prefrences > (in tree on left go to) Java > Installed JREs > click “Add” > Browse for “JRE home directory” > “C:\Program Files\Java\1.6.x” (or something like that) > it should find a bunch of system libs > then click “OK”
4. WHILE STILL IN THE PREFERENCES WINDOW > verify new JRE is checked Preferences > Java > Installed JREs (should have jre1.6.xxx checked, INSTEAD OF Flex builder 3
5. Preferences > Java > Compiler > (in first drop down) Compiler compliance level: select “6.0″ instead of “5″
6. NET Commons Jar file: commons-net-1.4.1.jar
7. Getting FTP to work with Eclipse: getting-ftp-to-work-with-ant-in-eclipse
8. ANT Commons Jar file: ant-commons-net.jar
9. That should be all you have to do to get ANT up and running.

Links:

• Some Noteworthy negatives about deployment using ant: ant-sucks-for-ftp-deployment
• Book: Ant In Action By Steve Loughran
• Adobe: AIR Update Framework

Here are some links that you may need to follow along with the video.

• Download Air Update Framework
  • you will need the update framework
  • as well as the sample files

Here is the video.

Video on using the air update framework

Here is the zip of the Project – SOURCE

The Problem

When you embed a lot of fonts you immediately hurt your compile times. In the video I go about showing you how just embedding a few fonts can’t hurt your compile times, I have about 8 fonts embedded and 2 of them with bold font embeddings as well. This slowed down my compile time to 8 seconds, with barely any mxml, it’s all css and embedding fonts that caused the issue. This post goes to show you how to create a separate project to hold your css and how to include it as runtime css in your original project.

A (possible) Solution

The solution is to create a separate project to hold you css and embedded assets, the reason for this is most the time in your development cycle once you are done setting up the style it just sets there… and then you work on the logic of the application…

So what you do is create a separate project put your css and the embedded assets in the seperate project, and set its output folder to be the actual project’s html-template folder, then you right-click the css file and make sure “Compile CSS to SWF” is checked. This tells flexbuilder to compile a swf just for the css file… NOTE: you may have to make a change to the css file to get it to output the swf.

Once the file is a swf, and the output folder is your destination project you simply use StyleManager.loadStyleDeclarations(‘somecss.swf’); to load your css on the “initialize” event of the main application mxml file.

To also help improve compile times you can try using unicode ranges for you font as well, and only embedding what you need Using unicode ranges for fonts

Please see the video for more details

 Here is the zip of the Project - SOURCE

THE VIDEO

(be patient, it takes a minute to load)

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/badger_for_air_apps.html?devcon=f3

There probably is more than likely a better way to do this, I’m told that when you use “Prepared” sql statements in air, it may fix the issue, but I’m on my first Air project, i’ve been doing flex for like 2 and a half years with CF on the backend, and so i know all the tricks in cf to fix the issues, but in AIR we just wrote a function to do it…

PROBLEM:

I have an object called “TeamVO” it looks like this

• TeamVO
  • TeamName:String
  • TeamID:Number

teamVO:TeamVO = new TeamVO;
teamVO.teamName = "Jakes's Team";

When I insert that into the db, I always get errors back… so we (by we I mean Jake Churchill ) came up with a function to handle that for use… this will only work if your using objects like we are, but more than likely you are… if not, you can still use the replace statment in it.

/**
* this escapes single ticks so they can be stored in the DB correctly
**/
public function escapeStrings( value:Object ):Object
{
// get object details
var objectDescription:XML = flash.utils.describeType(value);
// get object properties as XMLList
var objectProperties:XMLList = new XMLList(objectDescription.accessor);
// create a new object to store modified data in
var newVal:Object = new Object();

// loop over all properties
for( var x:uint = 0; x < objectProperties.length(); x++ )
{
// if the property is a string, escape single ticks
if( objectDescription.accessor[x].@type == “String” )
{
newVal[objectDescription.accessor[x].@name] = String(value[objectDescription.accessor[x].@name]).replace(‘\”,’\'\”);
}
// otherwise just grab the value of the property as it is
else
{
newVal[objectDescription.accessor[x].@name] = value[objectDescription.accessor[x].@name];
}
}

// return new value
return newVal;
}

this function loops of the properties of an object, finds out if it’s a string, and replaces the single ticks with something acceptable in the db…

Application - Source

here is a link by David Tucker to find the number of lines in a file.

http://www.davidtucker.net/2008/08/22/air-tip-13-number-of-lines-in-a-text-file/

I really hate that you can’t find stuff in windows based on size… i mean… yeah… you can sort it, but you can’t filter it and ONLY see certain things.

One of my current side projects I’m doing has a component that is like a stopwatch… so I downloaded a digital clock looking true type font, and implemented it in the stopwatch component… but the project was so fast at compiling, and once I added the 5 versions embeded of the font, (1 for normal, one for bold, one for italic, one for antialiased, and then the arial font type…) it slowed down the compiling by 8 seconds… i was like… dammmmnn!… so since my stopwatch only needs numbers, I’m using unicode ranges…

 @font-face {
src:url("fonts/DS-DIGIB.TTF");
fontFamily:Digital;
advancedAntiAliasing:true;
fontWeight:bold;
unicode-range:
U+0020-U+0040 /* Punctuation, Numbers and Symbols */
/* U+0041-U+005A, Upper-Case A-Z */
/* U+005B-U+0060, Punctuation and Symbols */
/* U+0061-U+007A, Lower-Case a-z */
/* U+007B-U+007E; Punctuation and Symbols */
}

it brought my compiling time back, and all was gooooooood. Here’s a link for the official flex docs…

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=LiveDocs_Parts&file=00000792.html

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=extensionDetail&loc=en_us&extid=1427019

Awesome air app that has tons of community components listed, with example showings… it’s pretty awesome!