Why I love development perspective

I have to tell you, I spend a lot of time debugging. So for a long time, I just left Flex Builder in Debugging persoective unless I needed to work in design view for some reason. But then I realized that Development Perspective gave me more vertical space in the code window, and I started switching to it more often. I'll admit, that's not exciting enough to post about.

But once I started working in Development Perspective more often, I started noticing that the Outline pane was much more useful than what I previously thought. Whenever I'd seen the Outline pane presented before, it was just a way to get hold of items in Design view that were underneath other items or otherwise hard to select. But Outline view is an aid I use daily now, because I can see the overall structure of a class at a glance, or click on a method or variable and instantly be taken to where it is defined in the code.

I don't know how I missed the documentation of this wonderful feature.

Filtering Bookmarks, Warnings, and Errors in Flex Builder

Up until recently, I almost never kept more than one project open in Flex Builder at the same time. The reason was simple: if I was looking at Project A, I found it very confusing to see bookmarks or warnings from other projects in the Bookmarks or Problems panel.

Several months ago, I looked for a way to filter this, but for some reason I couldn't find it. Last week, I was more successful. If you click on the filter button () in either the Problems panel or the Bookmarks panel, it will take you to a dialogue where you can select an option that more suits your working style. I selected "On any element in selected project."

Now I can have multiple projects open at once without getting distracted.

Resources for Learning Flex

I started this blog to document the hurdles I was finding as I was learning Flex 3. In the year since I started blogging on Flex, this task has become much easier. I wanted to take a minute to talk about two things that I've noticed that are real improvements. First, the Start Page appears to update itself occasionally.

I've posted before that I had problems learning to use the debugger due to lack of resources that explain its basic functionality. A few weeks ago, I cranked up the Start Page for some other reason and noticed it had scroll bars. I scrolled down, and lo and behold! there was a link to a video tutorial on the debugger!

The second, I noticed just today when I was looking at the web version of the Flex Builder forums (I usually use NNTP). I noticed there's a forum for Flex in a Week, and since I'm nosey I opened it up and discovered a link to the Flex in a Week training course. I haven't had a chance to look at all the resources, but the topics look like they should be useful to the new learner of Flex. Thanks to the folks at Adobe for being proactive and helping new users over the learning curve hump!

Getting Help in Flex Builder

When I open the Help Contents in Flex Builder 3, the first thing on the page is Tip! Learn how to filter and reduce your search results by reading "Searching Help." The problem is that on my installation of FB3, this is a dead link. I checked it this week on my husband's installation, and his link is dead as well. I eventually figured out what this page would have told me, but I feel like I was really slowed down in those early months when I had no control over the search results that would flood the results page when I searched for anything. A couple of weeks ago, I found the Flex 2 version of the page, when I no longer needed it.

But I thought I'd share a bit about how my help contexts are set up, because I find that these really cut the amount of time I need to mine relevant information. I have two main contexts that I use most of the time. The first is "How to." This gives me access to the "how to" instructions on most of the topics that I would be working on. I have unchecked AIR for now, since I'm not working in AIR these days.

My second help context is just the Language reference. I find that my pattern is to read the how to for a general overview of how to approach a problem, then I switch to the language reference context for the specific details (like property values and what they do). Sometimes I use the "Find in Language Reference" option on the Help Menu, but I don't like it as well, because it resets my help context.

It seems to me that there are certain search terms that are very difficult to get to in the Language Reference context, because they are inherited by many components. Since the name of the component that is being inherited from occurs early in the documentation for it, it will often appear in the search results before the results for the component itself. So I've learned that there are a few ways around this. If I am searching for List, I type in ListBase. List will actually come up in the search results ahead of ListBase. If I am looking for UIComponent, I click on the first thing that inherits from it and use the link in the "inheritance crumb trail" to go to it. If I am looking for AdvancedDataGridItemRenderer or AdvancedDataGridGroupItemRenderer, I look for AdvancedDataGrid and click the advancedDataGridClasses Summary. This gives the advantage of allowing me to easily get from one class to another.

In the next few weeks, I'm going to try to post a few Tips and Tricks about how I use Flex Builder itself to be as productive as possible, independent of any code I might be using. I'd like to invite you, the readers, to consider these posts to be an invitation to discuss their own tips and tricks by posting comments. Hopefully, we can all trade our best productivity tricks and become more productive together.

Debugger and E4X

I had a thingie that I had built in Flex, and I wanted to change it from showing a property of the xml object passed in the data object to the itemRenderer to iterating through child nodes of the xml object to show multiple selections. I thought my problem was with the E4X expression, so I wanted to be able to quickly change the E4X syntax without having to recompile and run my project again. So I decided I'd create a watch expression with my E4X in it and just keep trying until I got it right.

It seemed that no matter what I tried, I kept getting "Errors in Evaluation" for my E4X expression. Finally, in frustration, I put my best guess at the E4X expression in a trace expression, and it worked like a charm. The actual problem was that the logic wasn't even going into the piece I thought it was. So let that be a lesson to me that the debugger expressions window can't actually evaluate E4X!

Oh, and if anyone knows something in the debugger that works like the Immediate pane in VBA, please let me know!

Flex Debugging Tutorial

When I first picked up Flex, I couldn't make heads or tails of the debugger, so finding and fixing problems took forever. I looked everywhere to try to find some documentation on how to use this thing. I finally figured it out on my own, but I've finally found a tutorial on the debugger that will hopefully help other new Flex users from sharing my pain.