Append string to a Flash AS3 shared object: For science

Question

So I have a little flash app I made for an experiment where users interact with the app in a lab, and the lab logs the interactions.

The app currently traces a timestamp and a string when the user interacts, it's a useful little data log in the console:

trace(Object(root).my_date + ": User selected the cupcake.");

But I need to move away from using traces that show up in the debug console, because it won't work outside of the developer environment of Flash CS6.

I want to make a log, instead, in a SO ("Shared Object", the little locally saved Flash cookies.) Ya' know, one of these deals:

 submit.addEventListener("mouseDown", sendData)
    function sendData(evt:Event){
     {
        so = SharedObject.getLocal("experimentalflashcookieWOWCOOL")
        so.data.Title = Title.text
        so.data.Comments = Comments.text
        so.data.Image = Image.text
        so.flush()
}
     

I don't want to create any kind of architecture or server interaction, just append my timestamps and strings to an SO. Screw complexity! I intend to use all 100kb of the SO allocation with pride!

But I have absolutely no clue how to append data to the shared object. (Cough)

Any ideas how I could create a log file out of a shared object? I'll be logging about 200 lines per so it'd be awkward to generate new variable names for each line then save the variable after 4 hours of use. Appending to a single variable would be awesome.

Answer 1

You could just replace your so.data.Title line with this:

so.data.Title = (so.data.Title is String) ? so.data.Title + Title.text : Title.text; //check whether so.data.Title is a String, if it is append to it, if not, overwrite it/set it

Please consider not using capitalized first letter for instance names (as in Title). In Actionscript (and most C based languages) instance names / variables are usually written with lowercase first letter.