I’ve been a bit laxed in updating this blog. However recently I came across a funny bug in migrating a couple of my ActionScript 2 projects to use and develop in Flash CS3. Typically for most projects I love using the project window.
Recently at work I finally got the upgrade and opened one of my Flash 8 ActionScript CS2 (.flp) projects in Flash CS3. I immediately published the project, as its one of the options from the project window. It came back with 72 errors, something about a naming conflict in my classes.
Well this is a lot, and although Flash CS3 does a great job directing you to where the error is (it now opens the class file and highlights the line with the issue), I for the life of me could not figure out what was causing this. So after poking around at various files for a bit, I recompiled the project and only came up with 12 errors. The really funny thing was I really didn’t change any of the code. And of course they were all classes I wrote for this particular project. So initially I’m thinking that I’ve royally screwed something up, which is always my first instinct.
So I poked around some more and eventually my errors all disappeared. My first thought was that maybe I didn’t restart my computer after I installed Flash CS3, which is always a good idea. However this was not the case (although yes I’m working on a PC at work).
So next I opened a similar project at work that has the same kinds of errors. This time I was working on this project with another coworker that was having no issues publishing the same files (we were using the check in/out setup from a local raid server). So after a lot of going back and forth, and even successfully publishing the my files on his computer (via a shared folder over the network) I finally figured it out.
So here it is, if you don’t actually open the .fla file (from Flash 8/MX 2004) in Flash CS3 before you publish it, the compiler will throw error for naming issues in your classes (it will say something like “The name of this class, ‘com.domain.slide.MonographBack’, conflicts with the name of another class that was loaded, ‘com.domain.slide.MonographBack’.”). Opening my Flash 8 .fla files in Flash CS3, then publishing took care of all these errors. How funny.