(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)

I’ve been meaning to blog about our findings with getting CI going for Flex, since I took time to whinge about it earlier.  It was a bit of a journey, but all in all, not that bad.  Much of the thanks goes to Hudson, which is, how you say?, super-fantastic.  I plan to break this into a few blog posts rather than one big-old doozy.   The parts (I think) will be along the lines of:

Go get the following and download to your computer:

So, we’ll start by creating a new Flex Project in Flex Builder.

Hit ‘Next’ in the project wizard and we have our project.  Copy the AGS Flex API swc into your libs folder (see pic).

Now we can make a map and stuff.  Add the following code to your app:

Now we have our map.  In Flex Builder, build (Ctrl+B, unless you are using ‘Build Automatically’) the site and run it, you should see a map of our world.  Building with Flex Builder works, which was a requirement for me.  I wanted people to be able to build and debug in the IDE, but also quickly build from the command line with ant.  I like Flexibility, #rimshot.

Also, your bin-debug directory should be empty.  WOOHOO!  If you build with Flex Builder again (you may have to “Clean” since FB won’t build unless it detects a change) the files will go back into the bin-debug dir.  Right, now let’s get the build part going.  Adobe was nice enough to create ant tasks that will build Flex projects.  The easiest way to make them available to your ant script is to:

Now, let’s add the build-flex-project target, which uses the mxmlc Flex ant task.

WHOA!  OK, so I’ve jumped ahead a bit, so lemme ‘splain.  First off, we tell ant that this target depends on the init target, so it will run init before running the build.  Second, those funky ${} items that you see are properties.  So, you can see that I have one for":

change this to your Flex SDK directory path

FLEX_HOME=C:/Program Files (x86)/Adobe/Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.2.0

this points to your project’s src directory

{$basedir} is a default variable that can be used in any Antscript

and it points to the project's root folder [ flex_ant_pt1_Tasks ]

in this case

srcpath.dir =${basedir}/src

points to the project’s libs directory

libs.dir =${basedir}/libs

this is the folder we want to publish the swf to

deploypath.dir = ${basedir}/bin-debug

application.name=FlexAGSCI We need to tell our build.xml file about the build properties file, and we do so by adding this to the top (meaning, first thing under the <project> opening tag):

The last thing we need before running the build again is to change the default target to build-flex-project.  You’ll find the default attribute on the root project element.

Now, running ‘c:\ant\bin\ant’ (btw, putting c:\ant\bin in your PATH is advisable, then you could just type ‘ant’) at the command line, gives:

Look in your bin-debug folder, and you’ll see the SWF file, which should be fully functional.

I think I’ll stop today’s post there.  It has gotten a bit long on me (they always do).  The next post will cover how to get the rest of the files that Flex Builder creates, like the HTML wrapper and Flash-detecting javascript files, incorporated into the build.

Hope this is useful.