One of the problems I had when writing Flash Screensavr was sharing preferences between two separate and different SWF files - the Preferences panel and the Screensaver itself. Obviously a job for SharedObject.
However there is a trick to creating a SharedObject that behaves how you'd expect.
If you're like me, you would think the correct code is;
Actionscript:
var my_so:SharedObject;
my_so = SharedObject.getLocal("com.simonheys.screensavr");
But this results in a SharedObject which can only be accessed by the SWF that created it...not what I wanted. The not-very-obvious solution is to add a second parameter which is referred to simply as 'localPath' in the docs;
Actionscript:
var my_so:SharedObject;
my_so = SharedObject.getLocal("com.simonheys.screensavr","/");
That's it! You now have a useful SharedObject which you can access from any SWF on your machine. Having spent literally hours trying to track down the solution I decided to write a nice preferences class in a similar style to the one I use in Cocoa. Applications usually have unique preferences, so this is customised for each one.
Actionscript:
class com.simonheys.projects.screensavr.ScreensavrPreferences
{
public static var
PHOTOSTREAM:Number = 0,
PHOTOSET:Number = 1,
GROUP:Number = 2,
FAVOURITES:Number = 3;
public var
useHighQuality:Boolean,
username:String,
sourceType:Number,
sourceId:String,
speed:Number;
private var
_soId:String;
public function setSharedObjectId(soId:String):Void
{
_soId = soId;
}
public function storeInSharedObject():Void
{
var my_so:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal(_soId,"/");
my_so.data.username = username;
my_so.data.sourceType = sourceType;
my_so.data.sourceId = sourceId;
my_so.data.speed = speed;
my_so.data.useHighQuality = useHighQuality;
my_so.flush();
}
public function retreiveFromSharedObject():Void
{
var my_so:SharedObject = SharedObject.getLocal(_soId,"/");
username = my_so.data.username;
sourceType = my_so.data.sourceType;
sourceId = my_so.data.sourceId;
speed = my_so.data.speed;
useHighQuality = my_so.data.useHighQuality;
}
}
I did think about having methods called 'save' and 'load' but was obviously feeling verbose that day. You could of course have this as a Singleton in Flash, but I didn't need to.
The code for using the prefs is then as simple as this:
Actionscript:
_preferences = new ScreensavrPreferences();
_preferences.setSharedObjectId(Constants.SHARED_OBJECT_ID);
_preferences.retreiveFromSharedObject();
// retrieve a value
highQualityCheckBox.selected = _preferences.useHighQuality;
// store a value
_preferences.sourceType = ScreensavrPreferences.PHOTOSTREAM;
_preferences.storeInSharedObject();
Where Constants.SHARED_OBJECT_ID is something like com.simonheys.preferences.screensavr.
As opposed to an Un-shared shared object!
Thanks for this info mate, will use!
13 May 2007
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