Josh Talks Flash

JSFL makes me bang my head on the desk sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, JSFL is useful. I’ve been using it for some time now to partially automate builds for Flash CS3 FLA-based components. I can create component shims, live preview SWFs, and many things of that nature which normally take a long time to do manually. Unfortunately, I can’t get everything working perfectly for a fully automated build. Here are a few problems with JSFL that have been making me extra angry:

• library.updateItem(“itemName”) Crashes Flash CS3

  This works like the Update… option that’s available when you right-click on something in the library. Basically, it lets you update your symbols from a source FLA. This is useful for component examples that need an updated component symbol from the main FLA. Apparently, updateItem() worked well in Flash 8, but calling it brings the whole application down in Flash CS3. A topic about the crash on the official Flash forums includes a response from someone at Adobe that says that this bug has been fixed and will be included in the “next release”. Will this be an update to Flash CS3, or are we talking CS4?

• Copy an Item from one FLA’s library into another FLA requires confirmation

  As a workaround to the updateItem() bug, one can add a symbol from the source FLA’s library to the stage of the destination FLA. This will replace the out-of-date symbol in the destination library, but it displays a confirmation dialog that you have to interact with manually.

  

  Several other JSFL functions have flags to let you bypass dialogs like this (such as the bPromptToSave parameter used by fl.closeAll()), but document.addItem() does not.

• Component Live Previews cannot be set or updated with JSFL

  FLA-based components need a live preview SWF embedded in the FLA to have the component appear properly on stage when the user drags it there. As I mentioned, I can easily create that SWF with JSFL, but making my component use (or later update) that SWF is another story.

  To manually update the live preview SWF, you have to right click on the component, go into Component Definition…, click the Set.. button in the live preview section, click the Update button, click OK in one window, and then click OK in the next. There is no API to set or update it with JSFL, and all that clicking leads to long builds.

Hopefully, some of these things can be cleared up in Flash CS4 (or maybe a CS3 hotfix for that crash bug, please?). In theory, it will be possible to modify and create files using the upcoming XML/ZIP FLA file format called XFL completely outside the Flash authoring environment. It doesn’t help me now, but I rest just a little bit easier knowing that I’ll have an easy job creating builds in the future when XFL becomes available and I may no longer need most of my JSFL scripts. Adobe, want to make things just a tiny bit easier? I’d love for Flash CS4 to include a native command-line compiler to build FLA files. I already run Flash from the command line now, but I’d rather not have the whole IDE open when I don’t need any visual tools.