ObjectUtil where have you been?
Posted by Doug Hays on the 9th of June, 2007 at 6:29 am under Flex. This post has 94 comments.I’ve been writing Flex apps since I was 31. And now, when I look back on how dumb I was back then, it’s shocking. Writing my own date comparison methods and creating clone/copy methods by hand. Was I bored?
Well, I wish someone had noticed my stupidity and told me about mx.utils.ObjectUtil. What a fantastic collection of static functions. If you (who is even reading this?) aren’t using ObjectUtil in your Flex code, you should be.
My favorite functions:
- compare – will compare the properties of two objects (even recursively) – this is great for trying to decide the equality of two objects that were returned from a web service or remote object call
- copy – simple way to create a copy of an object. I’ve found this useful for purposefully breaking a data binding.
- dateCompare – self-explanitory
- toString – this is perhaps the greatest of all of them… for logging purposes, throw an Object at ObjectUtil.toString() and it’ll pretty-print the Object’s innards. It’s the var_dump of ActionScript
Enjoy,
Doug.