ACTIONSCRIPT 3 Developer’s Guide en

ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 DEVELOPER’S GUIDE
AIR application invocation and termination
Whenever an AIR application is invoked, AIR dispatches an InvokeEvent object of type invoke through the singleton
NativeApplication object. To allow an application time to initialize itself and register an event listener, invoke events
are queued instead of discarded. As soon as a listener is registered, all the queued events are delivered.
Note: When an application is invoked using the browser invocation feature, the NativeApplication object only dispatches
an invoke event if the application is not already running.
To receive invoke events, call the addEventListener() method of the NativeApplication object
(NativeApplication.nativeApplication). When an event listener registers for an invoke event, it also receives
all invoke events that occurred before the registration. Queued invoke events are dispatched one at a time on a short
interval after the call to addEventListener() returns. If a new invoke event occurs during this process, it may be
dispatched before one or more of the queued events. This event queuing allows you to handle any invoke events that
have occurred before your initialization code executes. Keep in mind that if you add an event listener later in execution
(after application initialization), it will still receive all invoke events that have occurred since the application started.
Only one instance of an AIR application is started. When an already running application is invoked again, AIR
dispatches a new invoke event to the running instance. It is the responsibility of an AIR application to respond to an
invoke event and take the appropriate action (such as opening a new document window).
An InvokeEvent object contains any arguments passed to the application, as well as the directory from which the
application has been invoked. If the application was invoked because of a file-type association, then the full path to the
file is included in the command line arguments. Likewise, if the application was invoked because of an application
update, the full path to the update AIR file is provided.
When multiple files are opened in one operation a single InvokeEvent object is dispatched on Mac OS X. Each file is
included in the arguments array. On Windows and Linux, a separate InvokeEvent object is dispatched for each file.
Your application can handle invoke events by registering a listener with its NativeApplication object:
NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, onInvokeEvent);
And defining an event listener:
var arguments:Array;
var currentDir:File;
public function onInvokeEvent(invocation:InvokeEvent):void {
arguments = invocation.arguments;
currentDir = invocation.currentDirectory;
}
Capturing command line arguments
Adobe AIR 1.0 and later
The command line arguments associated with the invocation of an AIR application are delivered in the InvokeEvent
object dispatched by the NativeApplication object. The InvokeEvent arguments property contains an array of the
arguments passed by the operating system when an AIR application is invoked. If the arguments contain relative file
paths, you can typically resolve the paths using the currentDirectory property.
The arguments passed to an AIR program are treated as white-space delimited strings, unless enclosed in double
quotes:
Last updated 6/6/2012
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