Flex Quick Tip: Printing an Objects' contents

You quickly learn in Actionscript 3 that tracing an objects’ contents is not always that simple.  Commands such as trace(myObject); often yeild the highly infuriating [object Object] return, which tells you mostly nothing of what you actually wanted to know.  After that you can move on to more advanced trace logic, like the handy;

for(var i in n) {
    trace(i+":"+n\[i\]);
}

But that’s a lot of stuff to type, and often yeilds infuriatingly long stacks of parameter traces.

Flex can make things a little easier, with this useful utility class, the cunningly named ObjectUtil class.  Simply import the class (import mx.utils.ObjectUtil;) and call the following method; trace(ObjectUtil.toString(myObject)); and you’ll get a nice output of all the properties of your object.

Kudos to flextutor.org for this, in their original post “How to print an objects’ contents in Flex.”  I thought I’d repost it here though, not least because there seems to be an issue loading their site as I’ m writing this article.