Categories
Programming

How to access your xml in flex

I’ve had a request to explain how I access the XML (using Flex) once I created the XML file out of the csv file using my csv2xml python script.

To access the XML in Flex, I’ve defined an XML variable in Flex :

private var content:XML;

And I then load the XML file into the content file.

fileStream.open(file, FileMode.READ);
content = XML(fileStream.readUTFBytes(fileStream.bytesAvailable));
fileStream.close();

If you are using my csv2xml.py script, the xml file was written with ‘root’ in the top and then for each row in the csv file an ‘element’ tag was used.

Between the element tags the content of one row of the csv is written, using the header of the csv file as the tag name for each item.

In order to access one of these tags below the element, for example the content of the tag ‘assigned’ you would specify the following :

var result:XMLList = content.element.assigned

As you can see, you do *not* mention ‘root’. This was a Gotcha for me for a while… This will store all the assigned in the result variable, which you can then
further manipulate.

BTW, I use the trace command a lot to check on the content of my vars…

In a variation on the previous, say you want to only get the unique values out of a tag, to store in a combobox so the user can use these for filtering the data :

// Function called from each filter to extract the unique values
private function addUniqueValue(alllist:XMLList):XMLList{
var list:XMLList = new XMLList;
//trace("*** Setting up unique values.");
for each ( var property:XML in alllist){
//trace("*** Property : " + property.toXMLString());
if(!list.contains(property)){
list += property;
}
}
return list;
}

You would get the unique values by calling the function in the following way :

var filterStatus:XMLList = addUniqueValue(filtercontent.element.Status);

This will get you a unique list of all the statuses in the xml file.

I hope this helps you get the goods out of your xml file !

(Visited 95 times, 1 visits today)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.