When Flex Builder doesn’t want to build

A very short arti­cle here about a prob­lem that is not a prob­lem that still remains a problem.

Say you got a nice shiny Flex project with Locales and inter­na­tion­al­iza­tion all around. You want to trans­fer the whole project to another developer’s work­space on another machine. The tar­get has got a fresh Flex Builder install, noth­ing cus­tomized and all. You import your project within the work­space and everything’s fine EXCEPT Flex Builder starts yelling about its inabil­ity to open a Locale (in this case a Frog).

A quick google-pet-sniffing tells the poor tar­get that he has to run a script on DOS or on the Ter­mi­nal to copy a bunch of files (see Adobe labs and Herreman’s arti­cle). Fine, he’s got a French locale. So he goes on the Flex Builder again which is still yelling with a deadly cross. First thing you do : close the project and re-open it. Sec­ond : close Flex and re-open it. Third : close the com­puter and re-open it. Fourth : close the office and…(what would you do next ?)

I’ll save you a cou­ple of min­utes here. The only solu­tion is to kill the project, delete it (not the files, just the project) and import it anew. And THAT WORKS ! Don’t ask me why.

It hap­pened to us a few times, not only in this case but on some other con­fig­u­ra­tions where Flex Builder shows PTSD symp­toms and still wants to dis­play a white on red cross when everything’s fine. Here, the fact that we imported the project after the mod­i­fi­ca­tion fixed some­thing. But some­times you haven’t done any­thing like that and Flex Builder (or I’d rather say Eclipse) is stuck in a state with your project. Just cre­ate it again even if it’s a hassle.

By the way, it’s not lim­ited to the Flex Builder. Flash got sim­i­lar prob­lems some­times. Like you want to save a class and com­pile but noth­ing looks like the changes were applied, except your file IS saved. You’d have to recre­ate an .fla and it’d work.

The Answer

That’s about the same solu­tion as kick­ing a device to make it work prop­erly again. I can’t wait to see in the next bad movie a hacker clos­ing the project and import­ing it again. “Haha look at that !”. He might not look as cool as beat­ing an engine in a spa­tial mod­ule with a wrench (remem­ber Armaged­don, that ris­i­ble movie ?) but given what you can see in block­busters, I say, why not ?