Feathers 4.0 Migration Guide (AS3/Starling version)

This guide explains how to migrate an application created with Feathers 3 to Feathers 4.0.

Removed APIs that were deprecated in Feathers 3

A number of APIs were deprecated in Feathers 3. See the Feathers 3.0 Migration Guide and the Feathers 3.3 Migration Guide for complete details, including a number of regular expressions that you can use with Find/Replace in your IDE to ease migration away from some of the old constants.

Themes and AssetManager

Feathers example themes that use Starling's Asset Manager have been upgraded to the new starling.assets.AssetManager class that was added in Starling v2.4.

The new AssetManager handles errors differently, so the example themes now dispatch a different set of events. In previous versions, the themes dispatched separate Event.PARSE_ERROR, Event.SECURITY_ERROR and Event.IO_ERROR events. Starting in Feathers 4.0, the example themes dispatch a generic FeathersEventType.ERROR event for all event types. This change is required because the new AssetManager no longer differentiates between different types of errors.

An example event listener for FeathersEventType.ERROR appears below:

theme.addEventListener(FeathersEventType.ERROR, function(event:Event, error:String):void
{
	trace("AssetManager error:", error);
});

The Event.COMPLETE event dispatched by the example themes has not changed.

TextArea inner padding

The TextArea component now supports a prompt, similar to the TextInput component. In order to position the prompt relative to the text inside the view port, a new innerPadding style has been created (with innerPaddingTop, innerPaddingRight, innerPaddingBottom, and innerPaddingLeft styles to allow inner padding on each individual side to be customized). This inner padding is used to position the prompt, and it is also passed down to the ITextEditorViewPort component to position its text.

Previously, you might have set padding, paddingTop, paddingRight, paddingBottom, or paddingLeft on a TextFieldTextEditorViewPort component to add some padding around the text. This will no longer work because the TextArea will pass its inner padding values down to the view port and your values will be overridden. Instead, you should set the inner padding values on the TextArea, and they will be passed down to the view port automatically. This is considered a breaking change.