Adobe Flash Platform * Manual orientation

Setting the stage orientation

You can set the stage orientation at runtime using the setOrientation() method of the Stage object. Use the string constants defined by the StageOrientation class to specify the desired orientation:

this.stage.setOrientation( StageOrientation.ROTATED_RIGHT );

Not every device and operating system supports every possible orientation. For example, Android 2.2 does not support programmatically choosing the rotated-left orientation on portrait-standard devices and does not support the upside-down orientation at all. The supportedOrientations property of the stage provides a list of the orientations that can be passed to the setOrientation() method:

var orientations:Vector.<String> = this.stage.supportedOrientations; 
for each( var orientation:String in orientations ) 
{ 
    trace( orientation ); 
}

Setting the stage aspect ratio

If you are primarily concerned about the aspect ratio of the stage, you can set the aspect ratio to portrait or landscape. You can set the aspect ratio in either the AIR application descriptor or, at run time, using the Stage setAspectRatio() method:

this.stage.setAspectRatio( StageAspectRatio.LANDSCAPE );

The runtime chooses one of the two possible orientations for the specified aspect ratio. This may not match the current device orientation. For example, the default orientation is chosen in preference to the upside-down orientation (AIR 3.2 and earlier) and the orientation appropriate for the slide-out keyboard is chosen in preference to the opposite orientation.

(AIR 3.3 and higher) Starting with AIR 3.3 (SWF version 16), you can also use the StageAspectRatio.ANY constant. If Stage.autoOrients is set to true and you call setAspectRatio(StageAspectRatio.ANY) , your application has the capability to re-orient to all orientations (landscape-left, landscape-right, portait, and portrait-upside-down). Also new in AIR 3.3, the aspect ratio is persistent, and further rotation of the device is constrained to the specified orientation.

Example: Setting the stage orientation to match the device orientation

The following example illustrates a function that updates the stage orientation to match the current device orientation. The stage deviceOrientation property indicates the physical orientation of the device, even when auto-orientation is turned off.

function refreshOrientation( theStage:Stage ):void 
{ 
    switch ( theStage.deviceOrientation ) 
    { 
        case StageOrientation.DEFAULT: 
            theStage.setOrientation( StageOrientation.DEFAULT ); 
            break; 
        case StageOrientation.ROTATED_RIGHT: 
            theStage.setOrientation( StageOrientation.ROTATED_LEFT ); 
            break; 
        case StageOrientation.ROTATED_LEFT: 
            theStage.setOrientation( StageOrientation.ROTATED_RIGHT ); 
            break; 
        case StageOrientation.UPSIDE_DOWN: 
            theStage.setOrientation( StageOrientation.UPSIDE_DOWN ); 
            break; 
        default: 
            //No change              
    } 
}

The orientation change is asynchronous. You can listen for the orientationChange event dispatched by the stage to detect the completion of the change. If an orientation is not supported on a device, the setOrientation() call fails without throwing an error.