Flash Week Day #4 – Twitter feed

10 Assigning the tweets

Create a new function called detailsResultHandler passing in an Object as a parameter. The object holds the returned Twitter information. You get to the information the same way you would do with an array, so object.result[0].text would be the first tweet. Assign all of the five dynamic text fields their results.

function detailsResultHandler(e:Object):void {

one.text = e.result[0].text
two.text = e.result[1].text;
three.text = e.result[2].text;
four.text = e.result[3].text;
five.text = e.result[4].text;

11 Format the date

Because we wanted the date or time posted to look the same as it does on Twitter you have to do a few calculations to turn the long date into something like ‘Posted 3 hours ago’. Start by adding a loop so you can do all of the five text fields in the same code block, then copy the code below to get days, hours and minutes.

sort dates
for (var i=0; i<5; i++) {
var currentDate:Date = new Date();
var postDate:Date=new Date(e.result[i].created_at);
var diffDate:Number=new Number(currentDate.getTime()-postDate.getTime());

var day:Number=1000*60*60*24;
var days:Number=Math.floor(diffDate/day);
var rem:Number=diffDate%day;
var hour:Number=day/24;
var hours:Number=Math.floor(rem/hour);
var rem2:Number=diffDate%hour;

var min:Number=hour/60;
var mins:Number=Math.floor(rem2/min);

12 Create the date string
Now you have your calculated day, hour and minutes let’s use an if statement to check whether the day, hour and minutes are not equal to 0. If they are not then amend the string. Lastly hide the hopping bird loader.

build string
var posted:String=”Posted: “;
if (days!=0) {
posted+=String(days)+” days, “;
}
if (hours!=0) {
posted+=hours+” hours, “;
}
if (mins!=0) {
posted+=mins+” mins “;
}
posted += “ ago.”;
this[“created”+i].text=String(posted);

}

loader.visible=false;

}

13 Exception handling
Add three functions which will deal with your error handling; there is nothing worse than running a program and not having a clue if the data is being returned and so on. These functions will give you feedback if an error triggers. Close the class and packages with curly braces and save.

function progressHandler(e:Object):void {
trace(“Loading: “ + e.bytesLoaded + “ of “ + e.bytesTotal);
}
function timeoutHandler(e:Object):void {
trace(“ERROR: operation timed out”);
}
function faultHandler(e:Object):void {
trace(“ERROR: “ + e.fault.message);
}
} // close class
}// close package

14 Final touches
Open up the fla file again and run your movie, you should first see the hopping blue bird for a few seconds then your last five Twitter posts will appear. All that’s left to do is publish your files which can be done in the Properties Inspector. Once you have done that you can copy the HTML object code and place it in your blog – not bad eh?

(This article originally appeared in Web Designer 157, authored by Darren Richardson)

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