It crossed my mind that occasionally storing data is useful. Sometimes it’s not, but that’s really no reason to avoid it.

And so began my journey to discover a way to save data at least in Flash, and on my Android. As far as journeys go, it was a short one.

I tried a few methods but only managed getting one to work (I didn’t try super hard, but that’s not to say that if I had, I would have been successful).

They are called SharedObjects, which you may remember from when we used Actionscript instead of haXe, and they are located at nme.net.SharedObject.

The pertinent excerpt of my test code is as follows:

var so = SharedObject.getLocal( "storage-test" );
// Load the values
// Data.message is null the first time
trace('data loaded: ' + so.data.message );
var count:Int = Std.parseInt( so.data.count );
// Set the values
so.data.message = 'oh hello! [' + count + ']';
so.data.count = count + 1 ;
// Prepare to save.. with some checks
#if ( cpp || neko )
	// Android didn't wanted SharedObjectFlushStatus not to be a String
	var flushStatus:SharedObjectFlushStatus = null;
#else
	// Flash wanted it very much to be a String
	var flushStatus:String = null;
#end
try {
	flushStatus = so.flush() ;	// Save the object
} catch ( e:Dynamic ) {
	trace('couldn't write...');
}
if ( flushStatus != null ) {
	switch( flushStatus ) {
		case SharedObjectFlushStatus.PENDING:
			trace('requesting permission to save');
		case SharedObjectFlushStatus.FLUSHED:
			trace('value saved');
	}
}

Pretty easy, right?! You set properties on your instance of the SharedObject’s data field, and that object gets serialized and saved when you call flush().

Perhaps you’re wondering, what’s up with this #if ( cpp || neko ) stuff? I know I would be, in your shoes.
It turns out, as far as I can tell, that the SharedObjectFlushStatus is some sort of (I don’t want to say magical, but I wouldn’t argue if you claimed at least some manner of sorcery was involved) fake enum and resolves to different types according to your compile-target. This may be inaccurate, but that’s what I took from the fairly clear and unbelievably short code in it’s source file.

I figured, if they can use macros for conditional compilation, well why can’t I? Long story still long, and so I did.

Now I can save data and you can too, for which I take full and well-deserved credit!

Your friend,
Brad