Comments for Learning Flash the Hard Way, from the Bottom Up

Comment on Deleting XML nodes: harder than it looks by Liza

Liza — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 11:19:37 +0000

If you ever want to hear a reader’s feedback :) , I rate this post for four from five. Decent info, but I just have to go to that damn msn to find the missed bits. Thanks, anyway!

Comment on Deleting XML nodes: harder than it looks by brio1337

brio1337 — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:37:43 +0000

kanenas, I agree, that’s the exact same piece of code I just determined for deleting a known XML node from its parent.

quinthar, thanks for your article, I agree that deleting XML nodes is harder than it looks! Part of the reason is that Adobe doesn’t explain very well how these XML and XMLList objects are related. I see some wording in your article that indicates a misunderstanding.
When you discuss child.appendChild(grandChild), you say that you expected it to return a reference to the node it just “allocated”. But there is no node allocated: grandChild is changed to be part of child’s tree. So now grandChild’s parent() and childIndex() are now valid. This has some consequences, such as you can’t take a node and append it to several other XML nodes and expect it to be in all of them. (You can use the XML object’s copy() function for that).

Similarly, when you call children() on an XML object, the XMLList returned is a reference to the actual child list inside the XML object. So if you delete a node from this list, you’ve actually deleted it from the parent!

I wish Adobe was clearer about this stuff…

Comment on Need a Global/Static FocusManager? Try the Application! by Geoffrey Hom

Geoffrey Hom — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 11:30:57 +0000

This totally helped me just now. I am not sure why it works, either. I saw that UIComponent has a focusManager property…

Anyway, thank you for sharing!

–Geoff

Comment on Deleting XML nodes: harder than it looks by kanenas

kanenas — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:04:16 +0000

The delete operator is indeed the official way (as mentioned in the "appendChild()" documentation) to remove a child node. Perhaps the "Attempt to delete the fixed property..." error arises because grandChild is not the result of an E4X expression? Whatever the cause, you can get a child node's index with the childIndex() method: delete grandChild.parent().children()[grandChild.childIndex()] A bit lengthy, .

Comment on Deleting XML nodes: harder than it looks by noah a-b

noah a-b — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 21:55:21 +0000

Wow! They can make things so darn tricky it’s, like searching for a needle in a haystack, only the needle could also randomly be disguised as either a thumbtack, a bobby pin, a screw, or a paperclip!

Your post helped me a lot, but I must say it was this little nugget that finally solved my node deletion issue!

“… you have to use the [0] index or the delete function will puke.”

Praise the code demons!

Comment on Deleting XML nodes: harder than it looks by Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 02:26:53 +0000

This post didn’t solve my problem directly, but you got me headed in the right direction so I thought I’d share the solution.

I needed to remove an arbitrary node at an arbitrary depth in an XML object. The solution is in two parts.

First, each element that will be deleted needs a UID so I used the UIDUtil.createUID(); function.

var xDoc:XML = XML(”);

I get the item to delete from a Tree.selectedItem call

var delItem:XML = XML(Tree.selectedItem);

Then the delete command is:

delete xDoc.descendants().(@uid==delItem.@uid)[0];

That searches recursively for all elements that have a uid parameter and matches them to the selected item’s uid. Since the return value is an XMLList (even if only 1 item is returned) you have to use the [0] index or the delete function will puke.

Enjoy :)

Comment on Confounding MXML Namespaces by elena

elena — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 10:40:43 +0000

I like better dots.

@Matthew: you seem like a cocky rocket-scientist-wannabe. There are definitely better ways to say things.

peace out

Comment on Flash Security is Stupid by Shubhra

Shubhra — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:35:33 +0000

hey guys, I’m another flex developer totally frustrated by the new down the gutter security model of Flash player. I can see that Dave was able to crack it by using the right crossdomain.xml. please please please share it!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m tired of getting endlessly frustrated

lots of advance thanks………

Comment on Flash Security is Stupid by quinthar

quinthar — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:20:58 +0000

I think with enough pain and suffering I did eventually get the above instructions to work; what exactly are you trying to do?

Also, can you post a URL to your super-permissive crossdomain file? Somehow it got lost in translation.

Comment on Flash Security is Stupid by Dave

Dave — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:14:11 +0000

Problem solved and man did it turn out to be simple!

Many Thanks to George Masters for the great set of eyes and assistance!

Here’s the content of the crossdomain.xml file you need for the most permissive access ever!