Getting Around Unknown Namepsaces in Flex/AS3

In my last post I presented a RegEx solution to remove a pesky namespace from an XML response payload; another possible solution is to use the * notation to specify any namespace like the following:

Any namespace

The following example shows how to get an element or attribute value when any namespace is specified on the element or attribute:

var attributes:XMLList = XML(event.result).*::Description.*::value;

The previous code returns xxx for either one of the following XML documents:

XML document one:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<rdf:Description>
<rdf:value>xxx</rdf:value>
</rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

XML document two:

<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:cm="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<cm:Description>
<rdf:value>xxx</rdf:value>
</cm:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

I nabbed this chunk of code from the Flex Developer’s Guide, section “Handling results as XML with the e4x result format.