My AS3 Regular Expression Tester (ASRET) has just been updated. With ASRET you can test if your expression behaves like you want to. It has some cool features like syntax highlighting, the ability to save your expressions, and calling the replace, math, search and exec functions of the AS3 regexp engine.

The new version brings live matching and result highlighting

With Live Matching turned on, ASRET evaluates the expression every time the expression, the string to match or one of the flags is changed. You can find ASRET here.

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Today I’m releasing the first version of my tree component. This component is a substitute for the build-in tree of flex. Why? Because the build in tree is build on the list classes, which aren’t the most stable classes of flex. My tree is build entirely with UIComponents and VBoxes, no list class used here. more…

That’s right, I was so fed up with the tree component of flex, that I decided to build my own. And to make sure that it will not end up as crappy as the default one, my goal was to make sure no listclass or whatsoever would be used.

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I just ran into another strange behavior of flex. Lets say you have a VBox, with an image inside. When the user clicks the image, it should do some stuff, but when the user clicks (mousedown actually) the VBox it should start dragging. You would expect that when you click the image, both events are fired. This is true when you don’t invoke the dragmanager. If you call the dragmanager, it cancels out all further mouseEvents, thus preventing the code of the image clickhandler to execute. more…

I’ve updated my regular expression tester, this version includes:

• saving your regular expressions into a shared object;
• setting the regular expression flags
• some minor bugfixes
• a bit more style added

update 15-01-2008:

Version 1.1 released:

• the save function now also saves the string to match and the replace string

update 04-03-2008

Version 1.2 released:

• New style, because the black style was giving problems with selecting text (black selection box on a black background, not good!)
• Syntax highlight! When you hover over your expression you’ll see what the different parts of your expression mean!
  • When you click (to edit) the expression, highlighting is turned off, allowing you to make selections. To turn it back on click outside of the textfield and start hovering.

You can find it at http://www.idsklijnsma.nl/regexps/

An AIR version will follow soon!

For the past 2 hours I’ve been struggling with the regular expression engine of AS3. Normally, when I need to write an regexp, I test it in the Regular Expression Workbench, a .NET app which is quite handy. The problem however is that it uses the .NET syntax for regexes. Apparently, each programming language uses it’s own regular expression syntax. For example, in .NET you can create a named group using (?<groupname>), in AS3 you need to type (?P<groupname>). more…

The labelfunction of a listbased component is nice, but a bit limited.
For instance, you have to specify the (data)fieldname inside the function, which makes it impossible to use it for other columns. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could write one labelfunction for all your columns? I thought it would.

In order to accomplish this, I needed to have the columndata inside the labelFunction. At first, I was thinking of extending the labelFunction, but that wouldn’t help me much, because Flex was still sending only the original data and not the columndata. So I went deeper in the component, searching for the function responsible for calling the labelFunction.

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