Tag: xml

This is one of those things that took me much longer than I thought it would have. I needed to convert a file containing XML data to an ArrayCollection. My XML file looked like this:

<rows>
	<row>
		<col1>some value</col1>
		<col2>another value</col2>
		...
	</row>
	...
</rows>

I wanted to convert this into an ArrayCollection with each row as an object (and I didn’t want to have to loop through each item in the list). Here’s the solution I’m using.

import mx.utils.ArrayUtil;
import mx.rpc.xml.SimpleXMLDecoder;
import mx.collections.ArrayCollection;
			
private function convertXmlToArrayCollection( file:String ):ArrayCollection
{
	var xml:XMLDocument = new XMLDocument( file );
			
	var decoder:SimpleXMLDecoder = new SimpleXMLDecoder();
	var data:Object = decoder.decodeXML( xml );
	var array:Array = ArrayUtil.toArray( data.rows.row );

	return new ArrayCollection( array );
}

I’m not thrilled with this approach because I’ve needed to hard code the XML structure (’rows.row’) into the function. If anyone has a better solution I’d love to see it.

Best,
Hillel