The Task Manager framework provides an easy mechanism for constructing and executing complex sequences of operations. Each operation is encapsulated in a Task and can be associated with other operations in a variety of ways. This framework also provides a number of useful, reusable tasks for performing common operations. For example, here is how you could use the provided PlaySoundTask to play a sound:

var playSoundTask:PlaySoundTask =
	new PlaySoundTask( aLoadedSoundObject )
		.withCompleteHandler( completeHandler )
		.withErrorHandler( errorHandler )
		.run();
                    

In the above example, the completeHandler would be executed when the Sound completed playing successfully. If something went wrong during playback the errorHandler would be called. This is not very useful in and of itself however as the Sound class already provides a pretty easy interface for playing audio. But what if we wanted to create a chain of tasks that played a Sound once a piece of UI was initialized? This is also a bit of an arbitrary example but let's take a look at the syntax:

var waitForUIInitialization:WaitForUIInitialization = new WaitForUIInitialization( uiComponent );
var playSound:PlaySoundTask = new PlaySoundTask( loadedSound );

var waitForInitializationAndPlaySoundTask:CompositeTask =
	new CompositeTask(
		[ waitForUIInitialization, playSound ], false )
	.withCompleteHandler( completeHandler )
	.withErrorHandler( errorHandler )
	.run() as CompositeTask;
                    

In the above example, our sound is not played until the previous task has completed. If something goes wrong with the first task our errorHandler will be called and our Sound will not be played.

Using the Task Manager (or helper its tasks) it is easy to assemble a large sequence of operations that have dependencies on each other. One more example (although still a bit arbitrary) would be if we wanted to load an external file, wait for a UIComponent to initialize, and then play a sound once both of those operations had completed. Here's how we could set that up with Task Manager:

var loadFileTask:URLRequestTask = new URLRequestTask( urlRequest );
var waitForUIInitialization:WaitForUIInitialization = new WaitForUIInitialization( uiComponent );
var playSound:PlaySoundTask = new PlaySoundTask( loadedSound );

var taskManager:TaskManager = new TaskManager();
taskManager.addTask( loadFileTask );
taskManager.addTask( waitForUIInitialization );
taskManager.addTask( playSound, [ loadFileTask, waitForUIInitialization ] );
taskManager.run();
                    

In the above example, the TaskManager is configured to execute the URL loading task and the UIComponent-related task immediately. The task that plays our Sound however is marked as dependent upon the other 2 tasks and so the TaskManager will not execute it until they have both successfully completed. If either one fails then the TaskManager will dispatch an error event and our Sound-playing task will not be executed.

Although the convenience tasks provided with the TaskManager are useful, the real power of this framework can be seen when you create your own operations. This is typically done by extending Task or using a generic helper task like TaskWithClosure. Check out each of the classes below to see what kind of objects you have to build upon.