Flexia

Recently, I learned about the with keyword in ActionScript 3. I've been programming in AS3 for more than six months by now but I've never seen that keyword used in any source code or book I've read. I saw it for the first time in Colin Mook's Essential ActionScript 3. It can be used to write cleaner code when setting multiple properties of the same object. For example, suppose you want to set some properties in a custom Event class before dispatching it. It may look something like this:

var userEvent : UserEvent = new UserEvent( UserEvent.SET_INFO );
userEvent.age = 20;
userEvent.firstName = "Vladimir";
userEvent.lastName = "Angelov";
userEvent.friendsIds = [4, 3, 23, 6];
userEvent.description = "Some personal desc.";
userEvent.country = "Bulgaria";

dispatchEvent( userEvent ); 

By using with it will look like that:

var userEvent : UserEvent = new UserEvent( UserEvent.SET_INFO );
with( userEvent ) {
    age = 20;
    firstName = "Vladimir";
    lastName = "Angelov";
    friendsIds = [4, 3, 23, 6];
    description = "Some personal desc.";
    country = "Bulgaria";
}

dispatchEvent( userEvent );

The second example is somehow cleaner and you don't need to type the name of the object everytime you set some of its properties. Of course it's not worth using it you are only setting few variables.