How do you communicate with a website that requires HTTP basic authentication when building AIR with Flex 3 or Flash CS3? Take 饭否http://fanfou.com/home — the username contains an @ sign, and if you go straight to http://“+loginName+”:”+loginPass+”@api.fanfou.com/statuses/update.xml, you get an ioErr. I asked about this on Blueidea once and I’m still waiting for a reply. I searched online too, but most of what I found talks about how to configure server-side authentication, not how a client logs in… Someone asked about the login approach in C# and Java, but no answer there either. The only usable information was for VB and JS — with Ajax it’s easy, since the XML open method takes user and password parameters. Last year I scanned through the Flex code line by line and found that URLRequest has a setLoginCredentials method. Add the line urlR.setLoginCredentials(loginName,loginPass); and it will send the user credentials. Now that the new version of AIR has been released, that method is deprecated again. Since I never had the time to update the Fanfou AIR client I wrote last year, I didn’t pay much attention to it. Today I went to the official site and dug into it. The replacement:

A problem I ran into today: I have an swf file that I need to load into a main file, but I kept hitting the following issue: after calling loadSwf(“xxxx.swf”), it throws TypeError: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. The loading code looks like this: private function loadMainSwf(url):void { var urlR:URLRequest=new URLRequest(url); containtLoader.unload(); containtLoader.load(urlR); containtLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS,loadHandler); containtLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,loadCompHandler); } private function loadHandler(e:ProgressEvent):void { gLoad=e.target.bytesLoaded; gAll=e.target.bytesTotal; per=Math.floor(gLoad / gAll * 100); percent=per + “%”; perString.text=percent; } private function loadCompHandler(e:Event):void { containtLoader.contentLoaderInfo.removeEventListener(ProgressEvent.PROGRESS,loadHandler); containtLoader.contentLoaderInfo.removeEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,loadCompHandler); addChild(containtLoader); }

The day before yesterday I ran into this error: Error: Error #2037: Function call sequence is incorrect, or a previous call was unsuccessful. at flash.media::Sound/_load() at flash.media::Soun...