After getting some other work done today, I continued my search for the cause of the major instabilities I’m having with Flash. Last time, I tried to simplify things by creating a blank symbol and setting the class in the Component Definition dialog. Today, I took that a step further. I created the same class, but the class only contains public variables that are Inspectable. Every variable matches an Inspectable getter/setter combo from the original class. You can’t get much simpler than that.

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Update: I posted some additional information about the Inspectable issue.

So I’m working on some components, and they have Inspectable tags on all the properties that are customizable. Nothing new or exciting here… except that one particular component has a large class heirarchy with well over a hundred properties. Just about every time I mess with one of these properties, Flash starts acting up, and sometimes it even crashes without warning. After trying everything imaginable to track down the problem, I believe that Flash 8 is just having trouble handling so many properties at once.

Originally, I figured Flash was choking on some of the legacy assets in the library. There’s a lot of AS1 code floating around, and since I didn’t work on any of the art assets, there could be all sorts of evil lurking in the dark corners. So, to be extra sure, I created a brand new FLA, and made a new symbol for my component from scratch. I didn’t add any art, it’s just the component on a blank symbol.

After I set the class in the Component Definition dialog, everything is looking good. Then I try to save the FLA. It appears to work, except for one detail: The asterisk that says my file has been modified didn’t disappear. It’s definately not anything in the art. I’ve been hitting this fork in the road for the last two weeks, art or no art. I can continue working and hope that it works the next time I try to save the file (or the FLA gets corrupted and I have to start from scratch or get it back from CVS), or I have to close my FLA and open the last saved version to try doing the same thing over again.

Unfortunately, that’s the better behavior from Flash. Every once in a while, Flash will completely crash on me. Most of the time, Windows throws up that nice little “Ha, ha! Your program sucks! Do you want to tell us about it?” dialog. Usually this happens if a click on the stage somewhere after messing with some properties. Sometimes Flash just closes without any warning whatsoever while I’m compiling my SWF. I’ll just look at the taskbar and notice that it’s gone.

As far as I can tell, no one else is having this problem. I’ve done quite a few Google searches. The only thing I found that sounds anything like this behavior is in the Release Notes for the Flash 7.2 update. In the “Crash Issues Addressed” section, it says 96110 : Component property definition with Inspectable value incorrect will cause crash. As far as I know, all my Inspectable tags are correct. The only thing I’m not sure about is where exactly to use quotes, or if it even matters. Every tutorial for Inspectable is different.

Has anybody else faced problems working with Inspectable, or does anyone from Macromedia know of continued issues with Inspectable causing crashes?