AS3 Delay execution? - actionscript-3

Question

I'm querying Rotten Tomatoes' API for movies listed in an XML document. The problem I'm having is, whist iterating through and querying for each movie I'm hitting RT's API limit which, in turn, is throwing an IO error.
Is there a way I can delay execution in a loop for about a second or so, to avoid this?

Answer 1

Short answer: use a Timer.
Suppose you have 100 movies in an array:
var movies:Array;
And for each of these movies you want to call an API on the server. First I would maintain a variable to mark the current movie:
var currentMovieIndex:int = 0; // first movie
Then, assuming you're using URLLoader:
private function makeAPICall():void
{
// Construct URLRequest based on current movie object.
var urlRequest:URLRequest = getURLRequest(movies[currentMovieIndex]);
var urlLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();
urlLoader.addEventListener("complete", completeHandler);
urlLoader.load(urlRequest);
}
getURLRequest() being a function that gives you a URLRequest object for the movie you pass to it as an argument.
In your completeHandler():
private function completeHandler(event:Event):void
{
...
if (++currentMovieIndex < 100) {
var timer:Timer = new Timer(3000, 1); // 3-second delay
timer.addEventListener("timer", timerHandler);
timer.start();
}
}
In your timerHandler():
private function timerHandler(event:Event):void
{
makeAPICall();
}

Answer 2

What are you loading from the xml that is causing the error? XML should not take long to load. If your loading items contained in the xml then a timer will not be helpful. It'll take too long and give a bad experience. Say the user has a fast connection but still has to wait on a delay for each file. What I'd do is check to make sure I've loaded one file(loadBytes) before moving to the next file. You'd only have to do this with the largest file contained in each node should be enough.
That would be more flexibly dependent on the users connection.