It solves the problem of having your AIR application store an IExternalizable class on disk but then later adding more fields to that class. How would you read the old version of the class without encountering a runtime error if you tried to read the new field that wasn’t present in the older serialization?
Go the cookbook entry to find out how to do this and please rate the article!
I’ve encountered some odd behavior that I would have expected to work when calling readObject() to de-serialize an array of anonymous objects. If anyone knows what’s going on here, please enlighten me. I’ve also on Adobe’s bug tracking system if anyone wants to follow the progress at Adobe’s end.
I’m trying to read all of the bytes in the readExternal() function of a class implementing IExternalizable, so that I may use the position property to move back in stream in case I need to do so. The problem only seems to occur if I am trying to de-serialize an Array of anonymous objects. If I put plain old Strings in the Array it will work fine. I find this odd since I would expect
publicfunction readExternal(input:IDataInput):void{var arr:Array = input.readObject() as Array;
}
to have the exact same behavior as:
publicfunction readExternal(input:IDataInput):void{var ba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
var inputBytes:uint = input.bytesAvailable;
input.readBytes(ba);
var baBytes:uint = ba.bytesAvailable;
var arr:Array = ba.readObject() as Array;
trace("inputBytes == baBytes ?= " + (inputBytes == baBytes)); // traces "inputBytes == baBytes ?= true}