creacog

I’ve just been trying to delete a node and all its descendants from an XML object selected on the value of an attribute. Having read the “ECMAScript for XML (E4X) Specification” (PDF) as linked to from the Flex documentation I expected to be able to write the following…

delete theXMLObject..*.(@id=="theIDtoDelete");

however the above code will generate the following Flash Player runtime error…

TypeError: Error #1119: Delete operator is not supported with operand of type XMLList

The solution is simple if not obvious. The above code should be rewritten to ensure a single node is returned rather than a list…

delete theXMLObject..*.(@id=="theIDtoDelete")[0];

Distilled from this actionscript.org thread.