A common need in a system involving Flex is for the ability to build the Flex portion using Ant. While there are some online examples, there is not one that I have been able to find that does and describes all of the things I typically need to do in Flex . The things which I typically need to do are the following:
- Build optimized modules without having to declare a separate compile target for every module
- Include one or more SWC libraries
- Compile the CSS into a SWF to be loaded at runtime
- Create a custom HTML wrapper, that is also responsible for setting the application endpoint
- Including images to be loaded at runtime
- Uses a properties file to define all the elements
This build also assumes the following:
- There is one source directory called "src"
- Runtime images are somewhere under the source directory
- CSS is somewhere under the source directory
- All modules are in a single directory, that contains nothing but the modules
- You have the Flex ant task JAR in libs
- You have the Ant Contrib JAR in libs
- You have a separate index.template.html for the build that contains ${} variables for the endpoint
For example the following is my example project directory structure:
The build works by executing these targets as part of its default target:
- clean - deletes the deployment directory
- compile - compiles the main application into its SWF
- compile-modules - uses a "for" loop on all the MXML files in the modules directory and calls the "compile-module" target on them
- compile-module - compiles a module into a SWF file, optimized for the main application
- compile-css - compiles the CSS into a SWF
- compile-wrapper - builds the HTML wrapper for the application, and includes the endpoint using FlashVars
- copy-images - Copies runtime images from source into deployment
- clean-up - deletes any generated files
Here are the build files:
