Flexia

Suppose you need to set some properties for a class instance. You would normally do it like this:

var person : Person = new Person();
person.name = "Vladimir";
person.age = 20;

When the number of properties increases this can become quite redundant. In my previous post I used the with keyword which can lead to less bloated code in this situation. Here is another way to initialize an object in a clean way, very similar to the C# object initializers introduced in version 3 of the language. You can achieve this by adding just one line of code in your constructor:

public class Person {

    public var name : String;
    public var age : int;

    public function Person( data : Object ) {
        for( var prop : String in data ) this[prop] = data[prop];
    }
}

Now we can instantiate the class in this way:

var person : Person = new Person( {name: "Vladimir", age: 20} );

You may have problems implementing this if you are already using the constructor because, ufortunately, ActionScript 3 doesn't support method overloading. A simple solution is to add a static function in the Person class:

public static function create(  data : Object = null ) : Person {
    var person : Person = new Person();
    for( var prop : String in data ) person[prop] = data[prop];

    return person;
}

Now we have:

var person : Person = Person.create( {name: "Vladimir", age: 20} );