ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Name

XML.attributes Property — an object whose properties store element attributes

Availability

Flash 5

Synopsis

theNode.attributes.attributeIdentifier
theNode.attributes[attributeNameInQuotes]

Access

Read/write

Description

The attributes property stores the names and values of attributes defined by theNode. For example, the ALIGN attribute of this P tag:

<P ALIGN="CENTER">this is a paragraph</P>

is accessed using theNode. attributes.ALIGN or theNode. attributes["ALIGN"]. If the P tag were the only tag in our XML source, we could access the ALIGN attribute as follows:

// Create an XML object hierarchy
myDoc = new XML('<P ALIGN="CENTER">this is a paragraph</P>');

// Access the ALIGN attribute. Displays: "CENTER"
trace(myDoc.firstChild.attributes.ALIGN);

// Set the ALIGN attribute
myDoc.firstChild.attributes.ALIGN = "LEFT";

The attributes property is itself an object. We can add new properties to the attributes object, thereby adding new attributes to theNode, as follows:

// Add a CLASS attribute to the P tag
myDoc.firstChild.attributes.CLASS = "INTRO";

// firstChild now represents the XML source:
// <P ALIGN="CENTER" CLASS="INTRO">this is a paragraph</P>

Because attributes is not an array, it doesn’t contain a length property. Instead, we can access all the attributes defined on an element using a for-in loop:

var count = 0; for(var prop in theNode.attributes) { trace("attribute " + prop + " has the value " + theNode.attributes[prop]); count++; } trace ("The node has " + count + " attributes."); ...