Preparing Flash and Flex Applications for Testing with the FlexClient Library

Compiling Flash and Flex Applications in Adobe Professional IDE

Compiling Flash and Flex Applications in Flash(Flex) Builder IDE

1. Open your application project in the Adobe Flash Professional IDE.

2. Select File | Publish Settings from the main menu of the IDE or press Ctrl+Shift+F12 to invoke the Publish Settings dialog.

3. In the dialog, switch to the Flash tabbed page. If it is not displayed, select the Flash (.swf) option on the Formats page of the dialog.

4. On the Flash page, click the Settings button to the right of the Script combo box. Note that ActionScript 3.0 or later version must be chosen in this combo box (that is, your Flash application must be created with the use of ActionScript 3.0 or later), since earlier versions of ActionScript do not allow including external SWC libraries in SWF modules of Flash applications.

   

5. In the Advanced ActionScript Settings dialog, add the fully-qualified name of the FlexClient.swc file to the list of SWC libraries to be included in the application. For this purpose:

   • Switch to the Library path tabbed page.

   • Click the Browse to SWC file button.

   • Choose the FlexClient.swc file in the subsequent standard Open File dialog.

     The fully-qualified name of the chosen file will be added to the list of SWC libraries on the Library path page:

     

6. Click OK in the Advanced ActionScript Settings and Publish Settings dialogs to apply the changes to the application project.

7. Add code for initialization of the FlexClient.swc library to the source code of your Flash application. Depending on whether you store the source code of your application within a Flash document file (.fla) or in a separate ActionScript file (.as), you add the initialization code in one of the following ways:

   • If you store the application source code in a .fla file:

     • Select Window | Actions from the main menu of Flash IDE (or press F9) to display the Actions panel.

     • Select a scene in the Script navigator pane of the Actions panel and type the following code in the Script pane that displays the script code of the selected unit:

       ActionScript

       ActionScript

       import FlexClient.Agent;
       FlexClient.Agent.initApplication(stage);

       Note:

       Since you need to initialize the library at the application startup, add this initialization code to the beginning of the script. Do not enclose it in a function or class method call.

     • Close the Actions panel.

   • If you store the application source code in a .as file:

     • Open the ActionScript source code file (.as) with the implementation of the main class of your Flash application.

     • Add the following code snippet to the beginning of the script to import the FlexClient.Agent class:

       ActionScript

       ActionScript

       import FlexClient.Agent;

     • Call the FlexClient.Agent.initApplication method from the constructor of your application’s main class. For instance:

       ActionScript

       ActionScript

       import FlexClient.Agent;
       
       // The application's main class
       public class MyApp extends MovieClip
       {
         // The class constructor
         public function MyApp()
         {
           ...
           FlexClient.Agent.initApplication(stage);
           ...
         }
       }

     • Save the changes and close the source code file.

8. Save the changes made to your application project.

9. Select File | Publish from the main menu or press Shift+F12 to republish the application with the FlexClient.swc library included.

After you perform the steps above, the resulting SWF file of your Flash application will contain the FlexClient library and be ready for testing.

To include the FlexClient library in your Flash or Flex application using the Adobe Flash(Flex) Builder IDE, do the following:

Compiling Flex Applications With the FlexClient Library

Including Additional Libraries in the Application

We recommend that you disable Protected Mode in Internet Explorer:

1. From the Internet Explorer main menu, select Tools | Internet Options.

2. Switch to the Security tab.

3. Clear the Enable Protected Mode check box and click OK.

4. Restart Internet Explorer.

Disable Flash Player Protected Mode

Disable Flash Player Sandbox

From Adobe Flash Professional IDE

From Flash Builder or Flex Builder IDE

From HTML Templates Included in Flex SDK

Manually

To automatically generate a wrapper HTML page for your application from Adobe Flash Professional:

1. Open your application project in Adobe Flash IDE.

2. Select File | Publish Settings from the main menu of IDE or press Ctrl+Shift+F12 to open the Publish Settings dialog.

3. On the Formats tabbed page of the dialog, select the HTML (.html) check box. The HTML tabbed page will appear. On this page, you can configure some parameters of the web page to be created.

4. In the edit box to the right of the HTML (.html) check box, specify the file name of the web page to be created.

   

5. Click OK to close the Publish Settings dialog and save the changes.

6. Select File | Publish from the main menu or press Shift+F12 to republish your Flash application with the wrapper HTML page.

To improve the test performance, you can modify source code of the created page according to the tips below.
 

If you use Adobe Flash Builder 4 or Flex Builder 3 to develop your applications, you can generate the wrapper HTML page by modifying the Flash Builder (or Flex Builder) project properties:

1. Open your project in Flash Builder (or Flex Builder).

2. Right-click the project node in Flash Builder’s Package Explorer (Flex Navigator in Flex Builder) and select Properties from the context menu, or select Project | Properties from the main menu of the IDE. This will bring up the Properties dialog.

3. Select the Flex Compiler category and enable the Generate HTML wrapper file option:

   

4. Save the changes and rebuild the project.

To improve the test performance, you can modify the source code of the created page according to the tips below.
 

Flex SDK includes a set of template HTML pages that you can use to create a wrapper for the tested application. These templates are located in the <Flex SDK>/templates folder. Each template contains tokens (for example, ${swf}) that you will need to replace with values appropriate for your application. For more information about using the templates, see the About the HTML templates topic in Flex documentation (http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/).

To improve the test performance, you can modify the source code of the created page according to the tips below.
 

You can create a wrapper HTML page yourself, using any text or HTML editor. Below you will find the typical code of a wrapper page. Simply copy this code, paste it into the editor and modify the highlighted elements to match the tested Flash and Flex application:

1. Replace MyApp.swf with the name of the tested application’s SWF file.

2. Specify the application’s size (in pixels) in the width and height attributes.

3. Specify the id attribute of the OBJECT (or EMBED) tags that you use to insert your movie into the page. TestLeft uses this attribute to address the movie in tests. Also, this will improve the test performance. The attribute must start with a letter (A..Z, a..z) and contain only letters (A..Z, a..z), digits (0..9) or underscore characters (_).

Save the wrapper file into the same folder where the tested application resides. Note that the wrapper file must have the .htm or .html extension.

• To insert a Flash movie into a web page, you use the OBJECT or EMBED tags. These tags can contain child OBJECT or EMBED tags. It is recommended that you specify the id attribute for each of these OBJECT and EMBED tags to improve the test performance.

• The OBJECT (or EMBED) tags that you use to insert your Flash movie have the allowScriptAccess attribute. It is recommended that you use the “always” value for this attribute as this will provide better performance. Specifying the “sameDomain” value in the attribute can significantly slow down the test performance.