While I’ve had problems with Flash’s Inspectable tag in the past, I still actively use it in my daily component development. With highly complex components, Inspectable let’s me finish property definition quicker, and I can spend less time messing with details in the FLA. Just today, I discovered something that speeds things up even more, so I thought I’d share.

I’ve always been a little annoyed that subclasses couldn’t redefine the default value for Inspectable getter/setters without redefining them. Often, I’ll have a complex setter function in a base class, and multiple subclasses inheriting from it. In some cases, a particular subclass might need a different default value for that property than the others. I have two options. Previously, I’ve manually set the different value in the FLA. Unfortunately, with a growing class tree with many classes needing alternate defaults, it’s becoming a hassle. Overriding the setter in the subclass can create redundant code. Even if I make an extra function that gets called from each setter, I feel like I’m building a hack that makes things more confusing.

Today, I took a break to experiment with Flash’s behaviors with getters/setters, and I discovered a more elegant method to redefine an alternate default value:

class SuperClass
{
   [Inspectable(defaultValue="Some General Default")]
   public function get myProperty():String
   {
      return this._myProperty;
   }

   public function set myProperty(newValue:String):Void
   {
      //here's a lot of code, and I'd rather not use any hacks
   }
}

class SubClass extends SuperClass
{
   [Inspectable(defaultValue="A Specialized Default")]
   public var myProperty:String;
}

That’s not an obvious solution, I’ll admit. You wouldn’t expect it to work, but the getter and setter defined in the super class are still called in the subclass even if myProperty is defined as a regular variable. I guess it’s still a hack, but it’s more elegant than the alternatives. Not only that, but it’s the simple solution I wanted to find in the first place. Normally, I’d make a warning that this probably won’t work with MTASC, but you wouldn’t be using Inspectable with MTASC anyway.