At first glance one might think the ability to run asdoc.exe against an AIR project would be pretty much the same as compiling ASDocs for a typical Flex project - but it’s not.

I recently completed updating my AIRCairngorm project and decided to compile the source code documentation as I always do, however when I attempted to do so my build failed. Based on the exceptions asdoc.exe was throwing it was pretty obvious the build was failing because none of the classes in the AIR API could be resolved.

I did a quick Google search and unfortunately there wasn’t much out there explaining how to resolve the errors. After a little more digging around and exploring of the sdk I was able to fix the build. Basically asdoc.exe needs to point to air-config.xml as well as the location of the air swc’s.

Below is the final build I am using which will allow you to compile ASDocs for your AIR projects:

You will also need the asdoc.properties file to go along with it:

So if you happen to run into this problem in the future you can use the ASDocAntTask project to compile ASDocs for your AIR projects without the headaches.

Last week Cairngen 2.0 was released, and judging by my Firestats totals there has been on average, roughly 250 downloads per day.

Based on the feedback I have received so far, the single most requested feature users are asking for is an additional target which will generate multiple Event, Command and Business Delegate classes (Sequences) simultaneously.

Ironically, prior to the Cairngen 2.0 release one of the contributors (I don’t remember who, so if you read this please leave a comment and take credit where it is due) added a few additional tasks which did just this.

So after a bit of fine tuning and testing I have added three new targets which are as follows:

I have also updated the comments in both the project.properties file and the build.xml files, respectively.

If you have any additional feature requests you would like to see added to Cairngen, or if you have already implemented these features. feel free to leave a comment or send me an email.

Download Cairngen 2.1

It has been awhile since the release of Cairngen 1.0, and the feedback I have received from the community has been very encouraging. I am happy to have provided a first-of-it’s-kind utility which allows developers to save time when building Flex applications on Adobe Cairngorm. Additionally, many of you have contacted me with some really cool new features that you have added, some of which are now available in this latest release.

Objective
The main objective of Cairngen 2.0 was to address 2 issues which were inherent to Cairngen 1.0. The first being that Event / Command mappings were not automated. In Cairngen 1.0 developers had the ability to generate sequences which consisted of an Event, Command and optional Business Delegate. And although this was very useful as it generated all of the required classes, handled upcasting events and instantiating Business Delegates, developers were still required to implement addCommand() in the FrontController manually. The second issue was that Event types were not generated as uppercase. Event types are static constants therefore they should always be uppercase. This is not required, however it is a best practice. Again developers could easily generate the required Event class but they would have to manually modify the event type to make it uppercase.

These two issues were the main thing preventing Cairngen from full circle code generation and implementation. Cairngen 2.0 addresses these 2 issues by automating the process, thus allowing for even faster development of Cairngorm projects.

So what’s new in Cairngen 2.0?

What’s next?
I don’t know, you tell me? If you have additional features you would like to see added to Cairngen, or if you have extended Cairngen to provide these features, feel free to leave a comment on this page. I am planning on adding some new features in the near future. One of which will be the ability to detect duplicate addCommands.

I would like to thank the many developers who have contributed to the development of Cairngen 2.0. I am in the process of compiling a list of contributors, at which point I will update the release notes.

Cairngen is licensed under the MIT License.

Ant and Ant-contrib are licensed under The Apache Software License

Download Cairngen 2.0

A very important, yet somewhat overlooked area of design is documentation. For every public API published the quality of the code and it’s resulting usage is dramatically affected by the accompanying documentation.

In ActionScript 3.0 the ASDoc tool is invaluable. Not only is it fully supported, it is the standard for all ActionScript and mxml code documentation. Unfortunately, it is somewhat tedious to manually compile the documentation from the command line for each API you develop. To help assist developers in generating ASDocs from their code I have created a very simple ANT task which can easily be integrated within a Flex project to automate ASDoc generation.

The ASDocAntTask can be utilized from within Eclipse just as one would typically use a standard build file. Simply create an Eclipse project from the extracted file and specify the location of the source code you would like to compile documentation for as well as the directory where the generated ASDocs are to reside.

The ASDocAntTask project is comprised of the following files: asdoc.xml and asdoc.properties. Developers can specify project specific settings in asdoc.properties and run the default main target from asdoc.xml to both create the output directory, generate documentation from the source code as well as create a log file for the generated ASDocs.

The asdoc.properties file contains the following properties:

• asdoc.exe (location of asdoc.exe)
• src (location of source code)
• main.title (Documentation title)
• window.title (HTML window title)
• output.dir (Documentation output location)

The asdoc.xml contains file contains the following targets:

• clean (creates the output directory)
• create-docs (generates the ASDocs)
• log (creates the log.txt file)

These tasks can easily be modified to match your specific environment. They are very easy to use so if you do not regularly document your work then hopefully this will help get you in the habit.

You can download the ASDocAntTask eclipse project here