The FDT plugin for Eclipse is a great piece of software (way way better than other flash plugins for Eclipse such as ASDT and FlexBuilder). I use it for all my AS2 flash development. However it has always had some issues with the location of the intrinsic core ActionScript classes in Flash 8 because they reside in a FP7 or FP8 directory (see forum post here and solution here).

While this solution solves the problem of FDT not recognising intrinsic classes such as Object and String, It doesn’t resolve a very nasty potential bug.

DON’T rename a project if you have selected “Refactoring” – “Flash Explorer File Operations” in the FDT preferences.

What happens is it refactors all the intrinsic classes in the core library and renames all the classes in the FP7 and FP8 folders as if the folders were package names. E.g. Object becomes FP8.Object, String becomes FP8.String.

This causes FDT all kinds of problems, and Eclipse hangs while trying to refresh the workspace (while consuming 100% CPU).

This has happened to me on several occasions and it took me hours to work out the issue – i tried cleaning out all the cache and project metadata from eclipse, I tried reinstalling the FDT plugin, all with no success. I eventually set up a new workspace and imported a single project and eventually discovered what had happened.

The only solution is to copy over the core classes (C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash 8\en\First Run\Classes) with a fresh copy, or go through and re-edit each intrinsic class.

I’ve posted the bug here.

I was looking for an simpler way of setting default values for function parameters in ActionScript2. The way I usually do this is something along the lines of:

function set value(s:String):Void
{
if(s == undefined) _value = s;
else _value = "default";
}

One option is using a logical OR operator to set default values. For example:

function set value(s:String):Void
{
_value = s || "default";
}

According to the flash LiveDocs a non-Boolean logical OR operation first converts the first operand (i.e. the expression on the left of the ||) to Boolean and if true returns the resolved value of the first operand. Otherwise it will return the resolved value of the second operand (expression on the right of the ||)

In the use case above it works fine, but after exploring the non-boolean implementation of the OR operator we found the following behaviour. In both the string literal (“hey”) and the string variable (s), the Boolean value equals true, but when placed in a logical OR operation they return different results. See below:

var s:String;
s = "hey";
trace(Boolean(s));//true
trace(Boolean("hey") //true
trace("hey" || "dude");//"dude"
trace(s || "dude");//"hey"

Can anyone explain why the String literal is treated differently than a variable containing a String literal?

Oh and word up to Ian on this one for his input :)

[UPDATE] I know I could have gone with “toBoolean() || !toBoolean()” for the title but I think that is taking it a little too far.

[UPDATE 2] The only gotcha with this approach is with numbers as a value of zero converts to false.