Category Archives: XML

XML Node Parents

By Zevan | December 16, 2008
CLICK HERE TO COPY
Actionscript:
  1. function numParents(e:XML):int {
  2.     var num:int = 0;
  3.     while (e.parent()!= null) {
  4.         num++;
  5.         e = e.parent();
  6.     }
  7.     return num;
  8. }

Sometimes when reading through XML it's helpful to know how many parents a given node has. This function will do that. I recently used this function in an accordion widget.

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Yahoo Weather RSS

By Zevan | December 10, 2008
CLICK HERE TO COPY
Actionscript:
  1. var temp:Number;
  2. var weatherData:XML;
  3. var yweather:Namespace;
  4.  
  5. var zipcode:String="11211";
  6. var units:String = "f";  // "f" or "c" for Fahrenheit or Celsius
  7.  
  8. var yahooURL:String = "http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=" + zipcode + "&u=" + units;
  9.  
  10. var yahooWeather:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
  11.  
  12. yahooWeather.load(new URLRequest(yahooURL));
  13. yahooWeather.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onLoaded);
  14.  
  15. function onLoaded(evt:Event):void {
  16.  
  17.     weatherData=new XML(evt.target.data);
  18.     yweather = weatherData.namespace("yweather");
  19.    
  20.     temp = weatherData.channel.item.yweather::condition.@temp;
  21.      
  22.     trace(temp);
  23. }

This snippet comes from a student question about how to get the temperature from yahoo weather.

You could use this snippet to get lots of additional information based on a zipcode... like latitude, longitude, humidity, wind chill etc... The trickiest part of this code is the Namespace stuff... which I find generally annoying... probably just because I'm not used to it.

You can read some detailed info about the content contained in the RSS file here.

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DisplayObject describeType()

By Zevan | November 3, 2008
CLICK HERE TO COPY
Actionscript:
  1. for each(var prop:String in describeType(DisplayObject).factory.accessor.@name){
  2.     trace(prop);
  3. }
  4. /* outputs
  5. scaleY
  6. mouseX
  7. mouseY
  8. mask
  9. rotation
  10. alpha
  11. transform
  12. blendMode
  13. x
  14. root
  15. loaderInfo
  16. width
  17. z
  18. rotationX
  19. scale9Grid
  20. filters
  21. rotationY
  22. y
  23. stage
  24. scaleZ
  25. parent
  26. accessibilityProperties
  27. scrollRect
  28. rotationZ
  29. height
  30. name
  31. opaqueBackground
  32. blendShader
  33. cacheAsBitmap
  34. visible
  35. scaleX
  36. */

I First saw describeType() at senocular's AS3 Tip of the Day on Kirupa.

Also posted in DisplayObject | 1 Comment