Strange flex bug – caching screens

Hello All,

Thanks again for visiting by website/Blog.

The past week has been very frustrating for me. As you know (or not) I work quite a bit with flex development and AIR.

The environment for developing these applications is Adobe Flex Builder 3, I never had any problems with this peace of software, but this last week has been just horrible.

I will explain my problem.

As you know (again or not...) I'm not a designer and I don't wanna be one, so... I got all of the designs from the designer of the project via PSD, cut all of the "assets" to use in my flex application and started off with building each screen.

As always, I wrote some CSS (yeah.. Flex has css, same as HTML), build an swf file for holding all of the assets (swc), and started dragging in controls.

All pretty basic so far, but...

Sometimes (well, all the time) the flex just refused to build with the recent changes, After the first time I build an swf from the flex IDE, no change I made to the application actually "kicked in".

Action-Script
Because even the labels on the buttons refused an update, I even tried to write it in Action-Script, that didn't help me at all.
The application just would not update.

   1: private function initScreen():void

   2: {

   3:     screenMainText.htmlText="Please Choose which of the Questionnaires below you would like to compile for your Survey";

   4:     backButton.label = "Back to control panel";

   5: }

What did I do to see the updated?

I copied all of the code from the mxml file, deleted this file, created a new file, pasted in the copied code and WALLA, the updates "kicked in"

Strangely though even a project cleaning would not help

I emailed Adobe, but got no response so far, I will update here and tweet on the solution I hope they provide.

** I tried importing another project to the flex builder, but the error did not exist in another project, only in this specific project.

Flex "Verbal Month" date

Hi All,

If you are working with Adobe flex, you probably know that the framework does not have a function such as DateTime.Now().ToString().

Because of that, displaying a friendly date to the user is impossible unless you write a small extension to the getDate() function in flex.

This is The way to go

   1: var todayDate:String = "";

   2:         

   3: private function INIT():void{

   4:     getCurrentDate();        

   5: }

   6:  

   7: private var monthLabels:Array = new Array("Jan",

   8:                                           "Feb",

   9:                                           "Mar",

  10:                                           "Apr",

  11:                                           "May",

  12:                                           "Jun",

  13:                                           "Jul",

  14:                                           "Aug",

  15:                                           "Sep",

  16:                                           "Oct",

  17:                                           "Nov",

  18:                                           "Dec");            

  19:  

  20: private function getCurrentDate():void{

  21:     var date:Date = new Date();

  22:     todayDate = date.getDate().toString() + " " + monthLabels[date.getMonth()].toString() + " " + date.getFullYear().toString();

  23:     datePickerButton.label=todayDate;

  24: }

That's it, its that easy to get a date from flex.

You can of curse extend it some more in order to get the day.