R – How to read the value of a text input in a Flash SWF from a Flex App

actionscript-3apache-flexcs3flash

I have a Flex application, which loads a SWF from CS3. The loaded SWF contains a text input called "myText". I can see this in the SWFLoader.content with no problems, but I don't know what type I should be treating it as in my Flex App. I thought the flex docs covered this but I can only find how to interact with another Flex SWF.

The Flex debugger tells me it is of type fl.controls.TextInput, which makes sense. But FlexBuilder doesn't seem to know this class. While Flash and Flex both use AS3, Flex has a whole new library of GUI classes. I thought it also had all the Flash classes, but I can't get it to know of ANY fl.*** packages.

Best Answer

The fl.* hierarchy of classes is Flash CS3-only. It's the Flash Components 3 library (I believe it's called, I might be wrong). However, you don't need the class to work with the object. As long as you can get a reference to it in your code, which you seem to have, you can assign the reference to an untyped variable and work with it anyway:

var textInput : * = getTheTextInput(); // insert your own method here

textInput.text = "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet";

textInput.setSelection(4, 15);

There is no need to know the type of an object in order to interact with it. Of course you lose type checking at compile time, but that's really not much of an issue, you just have to be extra careful.

If you really, really want to reference the object as its real type, the class in question is located in 

Adobe Flash CS3/Configuration/Component Source/ActionScript 3.0/User Interface/fl/controls/TextInput.as

...if you have Flash CS3 installed, because it only ships with that application.

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