MXMLC WTF (8): Keys can be of any type as long as it’s String

Have you ever tried looping over all the keys in a Dictionary? The whole point of the Dictionary class is that you can have objects of any type as keys, unfortunately someone forgot to tell the ActionScript compiler that:

var dict : Dictionary = ...;

for ( var k : MySpecialType in dict ) { trace(k, dict[k]); }

Error: Implicit coercion of a value of type String to an unrelated type

WTF?

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 24th, 2008 at 07:39 and is filed under ActionScript, MXMLC WTF. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to “MXMLC WTF (8): Keys can be of any type as long as it’s String”

  1. Josh M Says:
    2008-07-24 at 11:03

    Unfortunately a side-effect of Flash.utils.Proxy:

    nextName(index:int):String;

    -Josh

  2. Robert Penner Says:
    2008-07-24 at 21:59

    It looks like you want to use a “for each” loop.

  3. Theo Says:
    2008-07-25 at 08:45

    @Robert

    I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m talking about looping over the keys of dictionaries, for-each loops are for looping over the values.

    @Josh

    Good spotting, that must be the root of the issue. This means that the error is not in the compiler but in the Flash API, or a combination of both, since the compiler has to be aware of flash.utils.Proxy.

  4. Robert Penner Says:
    2008-07-25 at 16:07

    Sorry, I misunderstood. So how did you get around this issue? Did you type k as Object or *?

  5. Theo Says:
    2008-07-25 at 16:38

    I type as * it saves me from casting. It’s not a common issue, but an annoying one.

  6. Josh McDonald Says:
    2008-09-10 at 08:51

    On further messing about, it seems it’s not the API’s fault, but MXMLC. It isn’t smart enough to know that subclasses of Object can only be indexed by QNames except Dictionary.

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