Mike Orth – Booya!

Usually, changing colors inside your application is easy. You can set just about everything from textColor to backgroundColor, inline (backgroundColor = “#FFFFFF”), in a stylesheet (background-color: #FFFFFF) or using the setStyle method( uic.setStyle(”borderColor”, “green”) ). But what if you are trying to change the color of an embedded asset?

Say your designer gives you an asset, like a black funky shaped blob for a logo or icon. Then, later on, your company changes the icons to white. Why wait around for 2 weeks while your designer finds time to change the graphic when you could change in the code? Or perhaps a better example would be if your application requires applying different stylesheets at run-time for users to pick custom colors and layouts.

This is where using transforms comes in handy. The ColorTransform class lets you do some cool things to set RGB and alpha offsets or multipliers as well as set the color explicitly, which is what this example does. All you do is create a new instance, set the color value and assign the instance.

This is not just limited to embedded assets. You can use transforms on almost any DisplayObject.

Example Application – Click Here

This is an extension of a great blog from Justin Opitz on normalizing value objects.  We were discussing the a best way to take objects that are somewhat similar in form and conform them to an interface. Normalizing objects allows you perform logic on data that is generic and more makes your code more reusable.

So imagine we have several different object types coming in, like Artist, Album, & Track objects with properties that are similar, yet unique, including “artistName”, “albumName”, “trackName”, among others. We want to put this into a VO with just “name”.

Below is a modified version of the translator. If you have several different VOs that implement an interface then you may want the ability to assign them as needed. Since it could be any one of the VOs being, we’ll pass it in as a wild card

and then return the newly assigned object. Also, if the current propety doesn’t match a pattern we’re looking for, then it assigns it as-is.

So here’s what the function will look like:

for (var s:String in vo)
{
//we are going to check each prop name to see if there is a match for our
//targetObject’s known properties
//obvious ly this list will grow the more props you have to normalize
//however it only grows once regardless of the number of non-normalized VOs

if (s.toLowerCase().indexOf(’name’) != -1)
targetObject.name = String(vo[s]);

else if (s.toLowerCase().indexOf(’id’) != -1)
targetObject.id = int(vo[s]);

else if (s.lowerCase().indexOf(’genres’) != -1)
targetObject.genres = vo[s] as Array;

else
targetObject[s] = vo[s];

return vo;
}
}