Specifications

175ADOBE FLEX 3

Building and Deploying Adobe Flex 3 Applications

Distributing SWC files

After you generate a SWC file, you can use it in your Flex applications.

You can also copy SWC files to a directory specified by the

library-path compiler option. You must store SWC

files at the top level of the user_classes directory or the directory specified by the

library-path. You cannot store

SWC files in subdirectories.

To use a SWC file when compiling components or applications from the command line or from within Flex

Builder, you specify the location of the SWC file with the

library-path compiler option.

Note: Do not store custom components or classes in the flex_root/WEB-INF/flex/libs directory. This directory is for

Adobe classes and components.

Using components in SWC files

If a component in a SWC file does not have a namespace, you can add a generic namespace identifier in your

<mx:Application> tag to use the component, as the following example shows:

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:a="*">

If the component has a package name as part of its namespace, you must do one of the following:

1 Add the package name to the namespace declaration in the <mx:Application> tag; for example:

<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" xmlns:but="mycomponents.*">

2 Create a manifest file and recompile the SWC file. You pass the manifest file to the compc compiler by using

the

namespace option. In the <mx:Application> tag, you specify only the unique namespace URI that you used

with compc. For more information on specifying a namespace for the component, see

“Compiling components

using namespaces” on page 167.

About manifest files

Manifest files map a component namespace to class names. They define the package names that the components

used before being compiled into a SWC file. They are not required when compiling SWC files, but they can help

keep your source files organized.

Manifest files use the following syntax:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

[...]

</componentPackage>