Back in September 2008 I published a post on Class Annotations in Flex, through which I provided an API allowing for a unified approach for working with AS3 metadata. Just recently I intended to use the Metadata API in a Flex 4 project when I noticed it no longer seemed to work as expected. After a bit of debugging, I realized the bug appeared to be related to changes in the result returned from describeType; specifically, the addition of the “__go_to_definition_help” metadata. Considering the Metadata API leverages describeType in order to introspect metadata definitions, this made sense.

I made some simple modifications to the API to work with the new metadata returned from describeType and this resolved the issue. While I was in the process I also refactored operations to return Vectors as opposed to ArrayCollections, as was the case in the original design; effectively optimizing the API for Flex 4 (as well as Flex SDK 3.4).

You can download the source/tests/swc/docs dist here; all of which will be available soon via SVN and a public Maven repository, more on that once it’s ready.