Listen to all event types of an EventDispatcher

Question

In Flex, is it possible to listen to all event types of an object that's an IEventDispatcher? addEventListener's first parameter is the type, which is a string. In many cases the documentation is not clear what event type it fires. I'd like to attach a generic listener to inspect the events.

Answer 1

I think you have to derive from this class and override the dispatchEvent method like this:

override public function dispatchEvent(event:Event):Boolean
{
    trace(event.type);
    return super.dispatchEvent(event);
}

Answer 2

The short answer is no, there isn't any built-in way of generically listening for all event types. You would either have to develop a system for managing this or do something similar to what splash suggested. Personally, I would create a custom event, override dispatchEvent, and dispatch your own custom event while passing the 'type' of the original event.

override public function dispatchEvent(event:Event):Boolean
{
    //Dispatch your custom event passing along with it the type of the original event.
    super.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent(CustomEvent.ALL, event.type);
    return super.dispatchEvent(event);
}

Then you could simply setup one listener for your custom event and easily track when and what events are firing.

Hope that helps.