ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
Working with XML
Traversing XML structures
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
One of the powerful features of XML is its ability to provide complex, nested data via a linear string of text characters.
When you load data into an XML object, ActionScript parses the data and loads its hierarchical structure into memory
(or it sends a run-time error if the XML data is not well formed).
The operators and methods of the XML and XMLList objects make it easy to traverse the structure of XML data.
Use the dot (.) operator and the descendent accessor (..) operator to access child properties of an XML object. Consider
the following XML object:
var myXML:XML =
Baking Extravagant Pastries with Kumquats
Contino
Chuck
238
Emu Care and Breeding
Case
Justin
115
The object myXML.book is an XMLList object containing child properties of the myXML object that have the name book.
These are two XML objects, matching the two book properties of the myXML object.
The object myXML..lastName is an XMLList object containing any descendent properties with the name lastName.
These are two XML objects, matching the two lastName of the myXML object.
The object myXML.book.editor.lastName is an XMLList object containing any children with the name lastName
of children with the name editor of children with the name book of the myXML object: in this case, an XMLList object
containing only one XML object (the lastName property with the value "Case").
Accessing parent and child nodes
Flash Player 9 and later, Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
The parent() method returns the parent of an XML object.
You can use the ordinal index values of a child list to access specific child objects. For example, consider an XML object
myXML that has two child properties named book. Each child property named book has an index number associated
with it:
myXML.book[0]
myXML.book[1]
Last updated 6/6/2012
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