ASDoc Gotchas

I’ve recently been trying to create an Ant script to generate ASDoc style documentation for some shared common code libraries.  I’ve run into a number of  issues and it was hard to find any good documentation or blog posts to help me solve my problems.  So I am going to cover some of the issues I had and provide some example code of the Ant script I ended up using to get my ASDoc generation to work.

Vector

One of the first issues I had was with the newer Vector class. I would see the following error when trying to generate the docs:

Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: Vector

The reason was by default the target player was set to 9.  I am using the 3.5 version of the Flex SDK and 3.5 can export to Flash Player 9 or 10.  The Vector class was introduced in version 10.  So it is necessary to set the compiler option target-player to 10.0.0.  I posted something about it here.

Cannot find swc classes

Some of my custom classes made use of classes from other frameworks.  I ended up with errors saying it could not find those framework classes.  I needed to let the asdoc.exe know where to find those source files.  This was fixed by providing the external-library-path compiler option.  I needed to point it to the libs folder where the swc files reside.

Cannot transcode

Some of the classes embedded assets using the Embed metadata tags.  I got errors saying it couldn’t transcode those assets.  This was because the asdoc.exe didn’t know where to look for the relative asset paths.  I needed to add the source-path compiler option to point to the source directory.

I hope this will help anyone else that runs into the same issues I had.  Check out this example build.xml file.  (If viewing in Google Chrome, make sure to right click on the page and view source to see the xml)