Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

Enhancing a Standard Control

In the formal, object-oriented sense of the word, to extend an object means create a subclass that adds to the features of a given superclass. Here we use to term interchangeably with the more informal word enhance, by which we mean customizing an object’s feature set either by adding methods to an existing class or by modifying a class to create a new one with the desired features.

It is often handy to enhance existing components that may lack the basic features for interacting with remote services. You can simply add the functionality to the prototype of the component, or overwrite the existing functionality. The basic syntax is:

               FComponentNameClass.prototype.myMethod = function (args) {
  // Method code goes here
};

The advantage of defining the method on the prototype is that it will be available for all instances of the component.

The class names of most components follow the convention of using a capital F (Flash), the component name, and then the word Class. If you are in doubt about the name of the component class, you can check the component definition in the Library. For example, a CheckBox class definition is named FCheckBoxClass. Other components have similar names, as shown in Table 11-3.

Table 11-3. The class names for common Flash UI components

Component	Class definition name	Linkage symbol name
CheckBox	FCheckBoxClass	FCheckBoxSymbol
ComboBox	FComboBoxClass	FComboBoxSymbol
ListBox	FListBoxClass	FListBoxSymbol
PushButton