Recently I've been reworking our in-house build process and dealing with a specific requirement; notably that graphical and text assets (and layouts) be separated out in such a way that they are combined - dynamically - at compile time or at runtime.

I went back and forth through a couple of different ways of doing it, and then threw out a lot of code, realising that I could hijack some of the Flex SDK's features to do it for me.

You specify the size of the initial window of your AIR application within an application descriptor file, like below:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0">
    :
    :
    <initialWindow>
	<title>MyWindow</title>
        <content>main.swf</content>
        <width>800</width>
        <height>600</height>
    </initialWindow>
    :
</application>

At Awen we use the Flex SDK to compile AS3 code and MXML from within Ant.

I'm currently in the process of updating our build system. Obviously, like all good build systems, it would be nice if a build only rebuilt things which have changed. Or rather, where the source code that affects a build product has changed. This makes a build process so much faster.

This originally appeared on my blog in September 2007.

I've been fighting this a bit today, and finally got something working, so I thought I'd set it down.

Situation

I needed to package a bunch of external MovieClips, sounds etc. into an external library .swf for loading at runtime; and then to be able to extract them by some sort of ID (akin to the old symbol name in AS2).

This all needs to be done for the Flex SDK.

Solution