Objects on the fly

[worthington747]

For the sake of writing less code, I looking for a solution for creating objects with a class declaration stored in a String.

How would the following object instantiation be writen to dynamically call the creation of objects using the following method?




var dynaBall:String="RedBall"
var myBall=new dynaBall()
//where RedBall exists as a library class


Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Sirisian]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_object

use enumerations.

[TheCanadian]

Look into flash.utils.getDefinitionByName

[McGuffin]

import flash.utils.getDefinitionByName;

var classStr:String = "custom.package.MyClass";
var classCls:Class = getDefinitionByName(classStr) as Class;
var instance:Object = new classCls("parameters", "too");


At some point, you need to add a reference to the class so that the code is compiled at compile-time, as getDefinitionByName will not load the class in dynamically. So you need to reference it somewhere like so:



import custom.package.MyClass;
MyClass;


This is sufficient to make sure you have access to it through getDefinitionByName.

[worthington747]

Phenomenal work guys.
AS3 is really pulling its weight.

[McGuffin]

No problems mate. You could do this in AS2 as well, with an undocumented class. Adobe likes to tuck away the fun stuff ;)

[jbuda]

how can this be done with as2?

[McGuffin]

// AS2
import mx.utils.ClassFinder;
import com.custom.CustomClass;
CustomClass;

// elsewhere in the movie
var className:String = "com.custom.CustomClass";
var classInstance = new ClassFinder.findClass(className) ("parameters", "here");