Mellentine Design

John Resig, one of my heroes and creator of the jQuery JavaScript library, wrote a great piece about overloading methods. He created a dead simple function that shoulders most of the work. Check it out:

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function addMethod(object, name, fn){
var old = object[ name ];
object[ name ] = function(){
[...]

That’s right, object-oriented Javascript. Let’s get to it. We’re going to make an object for storing and retrieving user information.
Let’s start with the base object:

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var User = function(firstName, lastName, emailAddress) {
}

We have to initialize the variables so that they’re available to the rest of the methods of this object:

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var User = function(firstName, lastName, [...]

Flash does not make it easy to handle XML. I’ve used some really bad code to help me parse arrays until I came up with this. It doesn’t handle elements of the same name at the same level, but it can probably be modified to do so.

var myParsedXML = new Array();
 
var myXML = [...]