AS3 Typesafe Enum - Flash Actionscript Tutorial

An enum is an object that allows you to type or set states of other objects. For example, if you have a person object, and need to track the status of that person, with the options of "Active", "WaitingApproved", "Archived", and "Banned", you would like to track, retrieve, and set that state reliably at any time. By attaching an enum to your Person object, each person could track their own state by viewing person.state.

A quick example would be:

[ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 CODE BLOCK]
var p:Person = new Person("Bob", "Barker", "active");
if(p.state == PersonState.ACTIVE) { Do Something }

This example says we should instantiate a Person object, with first name, Bob, last name Barker, and give them a state of "active", which gets parsed to the PersonState object as "ACTIVE". Now at any time in the life of the application we can say if(p.state == PersonState.STATE_NAME) { Do Something }.

The real power behind this is that we no longer require our memory if our IDE is as excellent as the free tool FlashDevelop. The Intellisense automatically pops up when we say if PersonState. - and the list will pop up for us! Lets talk about how to set this up.

Here's How:

Below we have the source for a DebugType class, with three standard static functions. The getDebugType function converts a string that you pass in, to the type - which makes it beautiful for strongly typing objects directly from XML Values. The toString function converts the type to a string so you can actually see what you are working with. Otherwise, its a bunch of static constants that just point back at itself saying "I'm my own type". Quite a nice little trick... here's the code:

[ACTIONSCRIPT 3.0 CODE BLOCK]

package {
public class DebugType {

public static const NONE:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const TRACE:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const TRACE_THROWERROR:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const TRACE_THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const THROWERROR:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY:DebugType = new DebugType();
public static const LOGREMOTELY:DebugType = new DebugType();

public static function getDebugType(type:String):DebugType {
var retType:DebugType;
switch(type.toLowerCase()) {
case "logremotely":
retType = DebugType.LOGREMOTELY; break;
case "trace":
retType = DebugType.TRACE; break;
case "trace_throwerror":
retType = DebugType.TRACE_THROWERROR; break;
case "trace_throwerror_logremotely":
retType = DebugType.TRACE_THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY; break;
case "throwerror":
retType = DebugType.THROWERROR; break;
case "throwerror_logremotely":
retType = DebugType.THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY; break;
default:
retType = DebugType.NONE; break;
}
return retType;
}

public static function toString(a:DebugType):String {
var retType:String;
switch(a) {
case DebugType.LOGREMOTELY:
retType = "Log Error(s) Remotely Only"; break;
case DebugType.TRACE:
retType = "Trace Error(s) Only"; break;
case DebugType.TRACE_THROWERROR:
retType = "Trace and Throw Error(s)"; break;
case DebugType.TRACE_THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY:
retType = "Trace, Throw, and Remotely Log Error(s)"; break;
case DebugType.THROWERROR:
retType = "Throw Error(s) Only"; break;
case DebugType.THROWERROR_LOGREMOTELY:
retType = "Throw, and Remotely Log Error(s)"; break;
default:
retType = "No Debug Type Selected"; break;
}
return retType;
}
}
}

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