BetaDesigns( Blog ).toString( );

Wow that was a big title!
Ok i know its not something you would usually have to do but I think this is useful anyway when you have a large list of public static constants declared in a class and you want to somehow loop through them without having to place them in an array or dictionary manually. For example i was writing a Translation utility class today and i needed to add this list of supported languages. ;

//Below are all the current language codes supported by the
//flash.system.Capabilities.language class :04/06/2008
//But that doesnt mean you cant pass in your own;
public static const CZECH 			: String = 'cs';
public static const DANISH			: String = 'da';
public static const DUTCH 			: String = 'nl';
public static const ENGLISH 			: String = 'en';
public static const FINNISH 			: String = 'fi';
public static const FRENCH 			: String = 'fr';
public static const GERMAN 			: String = 'de';
public static const HUNGARIAN 			: String = 'hu';
public static const ITALIAN 			: String = 'it';
public static const JAPANESE 			: String = 'ja';
public static const KOREAN 			: String = 'ko';
public static const NORWEGIAN 			: String = 'no';
public static const OTHER_UNKNOWN 		: String = 'xu';
public static const POLISH 			: String = 'pl';
public static const PORTUGUESE 			: String = 'pt';
public static const RUSSIAN 			: String = 'ru';
public static const SIMPLIFIED_CHINESE 		: String = 'zh-CN';
public static const SPANISH 			: String = 'es';
public static const SWEDISH 			: String = 'sv';
public static const TRADITIONAL_CHINESE 	: String = 'zh-TW';
public static const TURKISH 			: String = 'tr';
 
private var _supportedLanguages			: Dictionary;
private var _availableLanguages			: ArrayCollection;

Once I had this list i realized that I would also like to be able to return an ArrayCollection of all the available languages now i could have done this by creating a new ArrayCollection and adding in each language manually as an object but that means i would have to update my code in two places everytime we decided to add more languages. a better solution is to use the describeType and getDefinitionByName( ) methods in the constructor method as follows.

public function TranslationUtility( se : SingletonEnforcer )
{
   _supportedLanguages = new Dictionary( );
   for each( var con : XML in describeType( getDefinitionByName(
             'com.utils.TranslationUtility' ) ).child( 'constant' ) )
   {
      _supportedLanguages[ TranslationUtility[ con.@name.toString( )]
                                 ] = con.@name.toString( );
   }
}