I’m currently working on a project where I’m using a bit of reflection, and although I found a couple of reflection classes on the web, I was looking for something that worked out of the box without too much hassle.

Basically I was looking for something that allowed me to do new Reflection(myClip) and be done with it 9 times out of 10.
Making a reflection is not that hard (although I need to work on the alpha and falloff, will post a new version later), but getting it to work right with scaled clips with weird registration points was a little harder.

Anyway I think I came up with something nice, and it performs quite well. You can download the source and a bunch of demo’s here Reflection demo’s

Here is a list of features:

A couple samples:

The code:

A couple of screenshots of the other demo’s:

Also known as:

One of current projects involves some texteffects and I am loath to do anything on the timeline that can be done quicker by code. So my basic idea was (keeping the designer in me happy):

Doing the design stuff at design time on stage:

Doing the animate stuff at runtime through code:

At this point I was already thinking about converting the stage textfields to bitmaps but found I was thinking about optimising things too early, so back to KISS, basic principles first.

Silly me, I thought it would be easy in actionscript 2 to get the position of a character in a dynamic textfield. As in:

textfield.getCoordsOfChar (pIndex:Number)

but apparently no such thing exists. Ofcourse if you have a monospaced font, there are other ways to accomplish this, but this solution works for both monospaced and other fonts.

Although in actionscript 3 there is something like getCharIndexAtPoint, that is not quite what I needed.

Using a trick I managed to implement it in actionscript 2. Note that this is still under development, being researched etc, so it’s not a general I-will-work-everytime-approach. Anyway the basic principle is this:

• apply first the white textformat to everything, then applying the black textformat to the range (i, i+1)
  (basically in every iteration of the loop you set everything to white except the character whose position you are looking for)
• copy the textfield to the bitmap
• perform a getColorBoundsRect on the bitmap and voila an approximation of the character position

And I say approximation since it’s seems to be off by a couple of pixels, but close enough to be usuable. In addition large amounts of text will slow down the process considerably and small font sizes wreak havoc, but it’s good enough:

Download the prototype here, it includes the Greensock Tween classes, but you can use anything you like.

Also known as:

I was working on our AS2 logger today. In particular I was creating a setup where you could simply drop in a couple components in your fla and ‘tada’, you would have a reflecting logger at your disposal.

I’ll go into the reflecting logger and component creation in another post, because what happened was that during a test run I ran into the dreaded 256 levels recursion problem.

Some research indicated that the problem lay with getters and setters.

Imagine you have a class:

class TestClass {
    public function get id1 () {
        trace ("hello world");
    }

    public function id2() {
        trace ("goodbye world");
    }
}

Now do:

_global.ASSetPropFlags(TestClass.prototype, null, 0, 7);
for (var i:String in TestClass.prototype) {
    trace (
         "Property:"+i+" is function ? "+
         (TestClass.prototype[i] instanceof Function)
    );
}

Ok, truth be told, you will not do this every day. In fact building a reflection package is probably the only time this issue shows up. However I like to document stuff for posterity’s sake, so here we are.

Executing the code above will show something like:
hello world
Property:id1 is function ? false
Property:id2 is function ? true
Property:__get__id1 is function ? true
Property:__proto__ is function ? false
Property:constructor is function ? true

The _global.ASSetPropFlags is used to unprotect all the prototypes properties, in order to force them to show up. In a real situation, you should always make sure you keep track of the original settings of an object’s properties and revert the object back to those settings after you are done with it.

Anyway what is really interesting is that testing the id1 property to see whether it is a function or not, causes the underlying method (the ‘get’ method) to execute.

Luckily I never use getters and setters. But other people do. This is not to say that getters and setters are bad, just that I ran into a situation which I hadn’t anticipated .

In most situation this will not cause a problem either, but you never know. The getter might go into a recursive loop if no parameters are passed. A class might update it’s properties unintentionally, who knows? I don’t. I do know that if those side effects do happen, you will lose hours of precious time bughunting.

So how to circumvent these special properties of woe?
If you look closely at the output again, you’ll see something like __get__id1 in there as well.
These kind of methods will only be created by flash if you use getters and setters.

So how can you detect if obj[i] refers to a getter/setter and should not be executed?

Test for the existence of __set__i and __get__i.

As the saying goes, you’ll find the solution in the last place you look.

More information on ASSetPropFlags:
http://objectpainters.com/blog/2007/06/21/assetpropflags-explained/

Today I ran into a nasty ‘feature’ of FLfile.listFolder in Flash 8 on Windows XP.

FLfile.listFolder doesn’t list files that don’t have the archive flag enabled.

Workaround: none except enabling the archive flag for all files you are searching for.

Also known as:

I recently noticed two weird bugs while handling hitArea’s in Flash (I say bug you might say feature).

Situation 1:

- you have a clip on the timeline, let’s call it dialog
- you have a large hitarea below the dialog, let’s call it largeHitArea
- you have connected the hitarea to the dialog: dialog.hitArea = largeHitArea
- you have set the onPress of the dialog to anything but null

Everything works fine up to this point, the large hitarea makes the dialog act as a modal dialog, since you cannot trigger any mouse events below it.

Now the following happens:
- during a graphical redesign you think you are smart, fast and furious YEAH BABY and you apply a DropShadow to the dialog clip on the timeline.

Next thing you know, your hitArea has died and gone forever, dramatic ain’t it?

Cause: no idea, but I think cacheAsBitmap has to do with it.
Workaround: set the dropshadow on the dialog clip through code.

Situation 2:

- you have a clip on the timeline to which you want to attach a dynamically drawn hitarea

Everything works fine up to this point.

Now the following happens:
- during a graphical redesign you think you are smart, fast and furious YEAH BABY and you apply a glow filter to the dynamically drawn hitArea.

Next thing you know, your hitArea has died and gone forever, dramatic ain’t it?

Cause: no idea, but I think cacheAsBitmap has to do with it (again)
Workaround: create a bitmap from the dynamicall drawn hitArea first, attach it to a clip, set THAT clip as hitArea and apply the glow filter to it.

I ran into some trouble today that after skinning a v2 Alert component, none of my changes showed up when I implemented it in my main fla. My main fla ofcourse had it’s class export frame set to something different than export in first frame, and I knew that was the problem, but not quite how to fix it.

Normally you set the class export frame to something like 2 or 20 or whatever, disable the ‘export in first frame flag’ on all your content by running a jsfl like:

//
// DisableExport
//
// Sets the linkage identifiers for all items to false

var items = fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items;
var item;
for (var i=0; i item = items[i];
if (item.linkageExportForAS == true) {
fl.trace (item.name);
item.linkageExportInFirstFrame = false;
}
}

and then you make sure that somewhere after your class export frame you have a movieclip on the timeline containing all the stuff for which you disabled the first frame export.

Apparently there is an order to that content as well, and I had never encountered that before. In my case I had overridden the TitleBackground clip, the ActivatorSkin and ButtonSkin, and you have to make sure these are loaded before the components that use them.

So imagine you have a ‘all_my_content’ clip, simply put 2 frames in it, put the overriding clips on the first frame and all the components on the second with a nice stop(); to go along.

Problem solved.

Also known as:

If you work with V2 components in Flash, this tip will surely help you out some day: when using V2 Components such as a Combobox, you may find your buttons no longer work correctly. Overall, this manifests itself by not being able to click more than once on a button. Before you can once again click on the button, you must first move the mouse again. Especially with navigation buttons, on which you are usually click-click-click-click-click-ing, this is less than optimal.

This is appearently caused by some components which are not playing nice with a component’s focus. The fix is relatively simple and disturbing at the same time:

In the onPress handler of such a button, you must include the following:

Selection.setFocus (this);

A focus rectangle now appears on every button, and to remove that, you use the following:

this._focusrect = false;

It is also possible to apply this to all buttons at once:

Button.prototype.onPress = function () (
this._focusrect = false;
Selection.setFocus (this);
)

This will not be an option in most cases however, unless you rigidly commit yourself to overriding only a button’s onRelease handler.