A little trick I’ve picked up along the way is to enter Javascript directly into the address bar in order to peek at variables inside a running flash movie.

Well I got bored of always having to specify the name/id of the flash movie and having to re-type variable paths in, so i wrote a bookmarklet that identifies the first flash movie on the page, prompts you to enter the variable name you want to see and also retains your last entry in a cookie.

Just open the link below, copy the Javascript (making sure to remove any linebreaks) and create a link in your browser’s links toolbar. Paste the javascript as the URL (ignoring any warnings) and then click it when viewing a page that contains a flash movie.

View Javascript

As the dev team at Macromedia ( now Adobe ) has been doing some cracking work lately, resulting in the rapidly approaching E4X in the AS3, it seems rather pointless keeping my XML Parser behind closed doors.

Written about a year ago – and evolved from code written several years before that with a friend/colleague of mine, pedrodinis (site in portuguese only), this class extends the generic flash XML class, intercepts the flash-parsed XML and parses that into an object/array format.

The biggest benefit this class has provided me with is that it doesn’t fix your XML like the native parser does and instead returns a dependable success/fail and status report from the parse process. Just recently I had a UTF-8 character encoding problem with a localisation of a site I’d completed a few months ago. The XML looked fine and flash loaded it perfectly without any errors via the native XML class. I had also chucked in some verbose status descriptions instead of just the numeric ones for debugging / error messages, so I tried the same data request, but this time using my gbXML class and immediately got a load fail.

Features:

• Verbose status descriptions via getter (i.e. myXML.statusDescription )
• Support for error tags in returned XML.
• Parses XML into Object/Array structure for easy data access / iteration.
• Allows for Object/Array transformation back into a valid XML string for comparison or returning data to server.
• Maintains natively parsed XML, so firstChild, childNodes, etc are still available.

XMLObject Class