Binding Warning
While working on an AS3 class today I had the following message appear in the debug console:
warning: unconverted Bindable metadata in class 'com.example::SampleData'
Everything still seemed to work correctly, but the fact that the message was getting reported concerned me. Unfortunately, this message doesn't appear in the run-time error documentation, which makes some sense since there was no error number associated with the problem and it just a warning. Doing a little more digging I found that the message is coming from the class mx.binding.BindabilityInfo.as. Thank you Adobe for including sources with the framework!
It seems that when the binding is being resolved the class metadata is bad. In this case the metadata was:
<metadata name="Bindable"/>
<metadata name="Bindable">
<arg key="event" value="propertyChange"/>
</metadata>
The message results from the fact that the first Bindable metadata entry doesn't include an event name. The more important thing was what was causing the event not to exist? Turns out it was a combination of the ordering of my get/set methods and the fact that I was casting my object as an Object instead of as SampleData. A little code will help explain what was going on. First this is the simple application that uses the SampleData instance.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" xmlns:example="com.example.*">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import com.example.SampleData;
[Bindable]
private var _data:Object = new SampleData();
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:Label text="{_data.data}"/>
<mx:TextInput id="textInput"/>
<mx:Binding source="textInput.text" destination="_data.data"/>
</mx:Application>
The reason that _data is cast as an object is that in real code (unlike this simplified example) any one of a number of different types of objects could be fed in as the data to use. Next up is the implementation of SampleData that generates the "unconverted Bindable" error from above.
package com.example {
public class SampleData {
private var _data:Object;
[Bindable]
public function get data():Object {
return _data;
}
public function set data(data:Object):void {
_data = data;
}
}
}
This is where I get really confused about what the compiler and runtime are doing under the scenes. I've not looked at the "-keep" output to see if there is a good explanation. For the time being there are two solutions to the problem. The first one is to switch the order of the getter and setter in SampleData. The following change fixes the Bindable metadata and as such the error goes away:
package com.example {
public class SampleData {
private var _data:Object;
[Bindable]
public function set data(data:Object):void {
_data = data;
}
public function get data():Object {
return _data;
}
}
}
Subtle isn't it :) The [Bindable] documentation shows an example of the setter before the getter, it doesn't seem to emphasize that it can make a difference, which is why I suspect something else funky maybe going on. The other fix is to use more a strongly typed object reference. Using the SampleData class from above with the get before the set, this modified application will also cause the warning to disappear.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" xmlns:example="com.example.*">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
import com.example.SampleData;
[Bindable]
private var _data:SampleData = new SampleData();
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:Label text="{_data.data}"/>
<mx:TextInput id="textInput"/>
<mx:Binding source="textInput.text" destination="_data.data"/>
</mx:Application>
Again nice and subtle. If anyone has thoughts on why the order of the getter and setter might contribute to this warning, I'd love to hear them.