Haven’t been able to find a tutorial on how to make XML objects that would be worth writing about in a “XML for Dummies™” book.
So hopefully after this you’ll be able to writting XML strings like crazy 
XML is already part of Flash globaly, so you don’t need to import it.
To make this easier to understand, I’ll use a ComicBook as an example since I’m currently working on that project which requires the usage of XML objects.
In my project a ComicBook consists of the following:
- Comic Object
- Comic object contains an Array of Pages
- A Page object contains an Array of PageObjects (Sprites… MovieClips… etc….)
Now as you could assume, all these objects are nested inside our Comic object. Using nested for-loops, you can access all the information and perform different sorts of operations.
Comic will therefor, be our main Node. A Parent of sorts.
We create our first XML object tag:
var comicNode:XML = new XML(“<Comic/>”);
People who know a little bit of XML and/or some knowledge about xHTML, will recognize <Comic/> as being a closing tag.
Infact, when we try to view the resulting string, we get this:
trace( comicNode.toXMLString() ); // –> <Comic/>
This is perfectly normal and you shouldn’t worry yet that the output isn’t like <Comic><Comic/>
Later when you’ll be adding elements to the Comic Node, you’ll see that Flash will automatically adapt the XML structure to what you’re feeding it.
A really nice thing is that you can dynamically add properties to your nodes, like giving it an ID, or a Name.
For example, every Comic book I generate needs to have a name. I can do so like this:
comicNode.@name = comic.Name; // –> <Comic name=”TheNameOfMyComic” />
As you can see, using node.@ we can generate any attribute name we want! comic.Name happens to be a String variable in the field of my Comic class where I store the name of it.
Now for the real work! Adding different Nodes to our Parent Node.
Because Comic contains an Array of Pages, we need to create a For-Loop which runs through all the objects within our Array. The creation of our PageNode, is exactly the same as our ParentNode.
for (var index:Number = 0; index < comic.Length; index++) {
var pageNode:XML = new XML(“<Page/>”); // –> <Page/>
pageNode.@id = index; // –> <Page id=”0″ />
……
comic.Length is simply the length of my Page Array.
Now! We add our PageNode to our ComicNode!
comicNode.appendChild(pageNode); // –> <Comic name=”theNameOfTheComic”>
// –> <Comic/>
If you understand all this, then you’ve done it! You should now be able to easily make your own XML structures
Here’s a complete excerpt of my code so you get the general picture:
//Create XML
comicNode = new XML(“<Comic/>”); // <Comic/>
comicNode.@name = comic.Name; //Adding attibute -> <Comic name=”theNameOfTheComic”/>
//Add the Page objects
for (var index:Number = 0; index < comic.Length; index++) {
var page:XML = new XML(“<Page/>”); // <Page/>
page.@id = index;
// <Page id=”0″/>
comicNode.appendChild(page); //<Comic name=”theNameOfTheComic”>
//<Comic/>
//Add the PageObjects
for (var index2:Number = 0; index2 < comic.getPageByIndex(index).Length; index2++) {
var pageObjNode:XML = new XML(“<PageObject/>”);
var pageObj:PageObject = PageObject(comic.getPageByIndex(index).getChildAt(index2));
pageObjNode.@id = pageObj.name;
if (pageObj.movieClip.inputField != null) pageObjNode.@input = pageObj.movieClip.inputField.text;
pageObjNode.@type = pageObj.Type;
pageObjNode.@posX = pageObj.x;
pageObjNode.@posY = pageObj.y;
pageObjNode.@posZ = pageObj.z;
pageObjNode.@Width = pageObj.width;
pageObjNode.@Height = pageObj.height;
page.appendChild(pageObjNode);
}
}
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