Flash Remoting

I’ve been doing a lot of Action Script recently and needed a good library for making flash remoting calls. If you Google a bit you’ll find a very good one (for AS3) here. I’ve started with this one, but because I needed some additional features I’ve decided to create my own version.

Specifically, I wanted the ability to specify a time limit for remoting calls and have multiple ways of getting the result back (since it’s an asynchronous call). Here are some examples.

Connect the the remote service:

import com.onsysol.remoting.*;

var service:RemoteService = new RemoteService('http://myserver.com/gateway.php', 'MyService');
service.connect();

Make a remote call to MyMethod() and receive the result via event listeners:

service.addEventListener('onMyMethodResult', onMyMethodResult);
service.addEventListener('onMyMethodFault', onMyMethodFault);
service.MyMethod('param1', 'param2', 'etc...');

function onMyMethodResult(e:ResultEvent) {
    trace(e.result);
}

function onMyMethodFault(e:FaultEvent) {
    trace(e.fault);
}

In case you don’t want to use an event listener for every remoting call you make you can simply listen for a “default” event triggered after every remoting call that doesn’t have a specific event listener registered for it. So, instead of the above, you could have:

service.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, onResult);
service.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT, onFault);
service.MyMethod();

function onResult(e:ResultEvent) {
    trace('Result event received from ' + e.prop['methodName']);
    trace(e.result);
}

function onFault(e:FaultEvent) {
    trace('Fault event received from ' + e.prop['methodName']);
    trace(e.fault);
}

And finally, if you don’t want to use events at all to get the response, you could use callback/anonymous functions, like this:

var prop:Object = {
    onResultCallback: function(result:Object, prop:Object) {
        trace('do something in your function...');
    },
    onFaultCallback: function(fault:Object, prop:Object) {
    }
};
service.call('MyMethod', prop, 'param1', 'param2', 'etc...');

The default timeout is 2 seconds, but you can specify a new timeout value for all calls or on a per call basis:

// General timeout value, used for all calls that don't have a specific timeout:
RemoteService.TIMEOUT = 5000;   // 5 seconds

// Make a remoting call with timeout set to 20 seconds:
service.call('MyMethod', {timeout: 20000}, 'param1', '...');

You can handle timeouts by either registering specific event listeners (onMyMethodTimeout), using the generic event (onTimeout) or using callback/anonymous function (onTimeoutCallback) in a similar way to how a result or a fault is handled.

Download the library here.