Importing Packages in AS3

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Even the most simple task seems to take me forever in Flex, since I have to troll through reams of documentation to make sure I understand the concepts involved. This morning I came across something in one of my references that went something like this:

"Because this class is in the same package as the other class you want to use, you don't need to add an import statement in order to use it."

I went through reams of documentation looking for something to verify this, but couldn't. Finally, someone on a Google Group I belong to posted this quote from Colin Moock's Essential Actionscript 3.0.
"Code in a given package can refer to the classes in that package by their unqualified names... To gain access to a class in another package, we use the import directive..."

So yes, it's true. You don't have to import classes in the same package as the one where you are working.

1 comments:

gamebabes said...

Flex packages work like namespaces. The whole point of having them is to allow 2 classes with the same name (but usually different authors) to exist in a single project without messing with each other. So it's safe to call a class in the same package without the fully qualified name since it's guarantied to be uniquely named.

Having said that, I never understood why the package directive is there since flex won't allow you to rename it to anything other than the parent directory's name ("A file found in a source-path must have the same package structure as the definition's package"). So why doesn't flex use directory names for packages at the first place?