Reading all classes under a package or reading classes with same Metadata in Actionscript 3.0

I am doing an Actionscript 3.0 project which involves introspection. I am wondering if there is a way to get all the classes within a given package structure. For e.g. Say there are three as3 classes: com.example.test.classOne com.example.test.classTwo com.example.test.classThree

I want to be able to say

  getClassesUnderPackageName("com.example.test"); 

and get back

  "com.example.test::classOne"
  "com.example.test::classTwo"
  "com.example.test::classThree". 

Is there a way to do that?

If this is not possible, is there a way to read classes which have the same metadata?

E.g. If all the mentioned classes have the same metadata [MetadataName(type="example")] defined, is there a wa开发者_开发技巧y to say

   getClassesWithSameMetadata("MetadataName");

and get back

   "com.example.test::classOne"
   "com.example.test::classTwo"
   "com.example.test::classThree". 

Thank you.

you can use flash.utils.describeType to return XML data containing this information. it works differently on base classes, like flash.display.Sprite, but for custom classes/directories, you can write something like this:

package branchA.branchB.branchC
{
//Imports
import flash.utils.describeType;

//Class
public class Test
    {
    //Constructor
    public function Test()
        {
        trace(describeType(this).@name);
        }
    }
}

//OUTPUT:  branchA.branchB.branchC::Test

if you wanted to return the base class, you could write something like this:

package
{
//Imports
import flash.display.Sprite;
import flash.utils.describeType;

//Class
public class Test extends Sprite
    {
    //Constructor
    public function Test()
        {
        trace(describeType(this).@base);
        }
    }
}

//OUTPUT:  flash.display::Sprite

there is lots of other useful information you can get by parsing the returned XML data of describeType.

Update:

class objects do not need to have been instantiated first in order to retrieve their information via describeType(). you could build a public static function (or whatever) which accepts an array of your class objects and returns an array of strings containing the required describeType data.

something like this:

package
{
import flash.utils.describeType;

final public class Describe
    {
    public static function packageNames(classObjects:Array):Vector.<String>
        {
        var names:Vector.<String> = new Vector.<String>();

        for each    (var classObject in classObjects)
                    names.push(describeType(classObject.@name.toString()));

        return names;
        }
    }
}

then from anywhere in your program, you can pass an array of all the classes like this:

var names:Vector.<String> = Describe.packageNames(new Array(classOne, classTwo, classThree));
trace(names);

//Output:
//com.example.test::classOne
//com.example.test::classTwo
//com.example.test::classThree

There's no inbuilt mechanism for finding classes without already knowing the class name. :(

However if you load in a SWF as a ByteArray then it's possible to iterate through the classes in it.

This might be overkill for what you want.

http://www.bytearray.org/?p=175

Take a look at AS3 Commons Bytecode. It allows you to do Bytecode based reflection. You can list all classes (you'll need to filter those if you just want a particular package), list classes with certain metadata or classes that implement a certain interface.