Querying And Conquering Big Collections in ActionScript3 with Realaxy Editor

A new tutorial about work with Collections in ActionScript 3 with Realaxy Editor was recently published on ActiveTuts+.

Requirements
Program: Realaxy ActionScript Editor Beta 10 (build 8179+)
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated completion time: 20 min.

Intro

Good news everyone. Everybody who works with arrays and vectors - it pretty seems, all developers do it - will enjoy the new opportunities: since the late August 2011 (build 8179+), Realaxy ActionScript Editor (RASE) supports the new Collections AS3 language extension. In this post we’ll tell you about its potentials.

A collection is a general term that means something like “a bunch of similarly typed objects that are grouped together”. Building a collection in ActionScript 3.0 can be done by using either arrays or vectors. They both have some makings of a perfect concept. However, if you have even a basic acquaintance with any modern and trendy language like Scala, Groovy or Ruby, you’ll definitely feel the lack of a functional approach in the pure AS3-way of processing Collections.

The Collections Language

Well, let’s introduce the Collections AS3 language extension that is available in RASE Beta 10, build 8177+.

A complete vocabulary of methods supplemented with samples is available here: one for lists and another one for maps (scroll them down, they are really HUGE).

In order to not get lost in this jungle, let’s take a survey on some simple use case. The first true-life sample demonstrates the conciseness of a code.

We create a list, which can contain only int values.

1. Then peek only those that fulfil a condition (“where”).
2. Do something with every picked element (“select”).
3. Convert them to Strings (“select”).
4. Finally, to cycle through the list and to trace the result.

Where, select, selectMany — these operations are easy to use when you’re building a query.

Operations like all, any, containsAll, contains work perfectly in conditional phrases (“if” statement, etc).

To modify a list, go ahead to use a wide range of weapons — remove, removeAll, removeWhere, removeHead, removeTail, etc.

For those persons who definitely have an eye for perversion :D we have prepared a bunch of operations like foldLeft/foldRight, reduceLeft/reduceRight, intersect, etc.

Simply said, there are a plenty of various operations suited to every fancy and almost every task. In some operations you just transmit one or more values to it, in some other ones you add a closure.

Read and discuss the full article on ActiveTuts+.