Specifications

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CHAPTER 9

Using Flex Ant tasks

You can use the Flex Ant tasks in your existing projects or create new Ant projects that use them. There are three

tasks that you can use in your Ant projects:

• mxmlc — Invokes the application compiler. You use this compiler to compile Flex applications, modules,

resource modules, and CSS SWF files.

• compc — Invokes the component compiler. You use this compiler to compile SWC files and Runtime Shared

Libraries (RSLs).

• html-wrapper — Generates the HTML wrapper and supporting files for your Flex application. By using this

task, you can select the type of wrapper (with and without deep linking support, with and without express install,

and with and without player detection), as well as specify application settings such as the height, width, and

background color.

To use the custom Flex Ant tasks in your Ant projects, you must add the flexTasks.jar file to your project's lib

directory, and then point to that JAR file in the

taskdef task. A taskdef task adds a new set of task definitions

to your current project. You use it to add task definitions that are not part of the default Ant installation. In this

case, you use the

taskdef task to add the mxmlc, compc, and html-wrapper task definitions to your Ant instal-

lation. In addition, for most projects you set the value of the

FLEX_HOME variable so that Ant can find your flex-

config.xml file and so that you can add the frameworks directory to your source path.

Use the Flex tasks in Ant:

1 Add a new taskdef task to your project. In this task, specify the flexTasks.tasks file as the resource, and point

to the flexTasks.jar file for the classpath. For example:

<taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks"

classpath="${basedir}/flexTasks/lib/flexTasks.jar" />

2 Define the FLEX_HOME and APP_ROOT properties. Use these properties to point to your Flex SDK’s root

directory and application's root directory. Although not required, creating properties for these directories is a

common practice because you will probably use them several times in your Ant tasks, for example:

3 Write a target that uses the Flex Ant tasks. The following example defines the main target that uses the mxmlc

task to compile the Main.mxml file:

<load-config filename="${FLEX_HOME}/frameworks/flex-config.xml"/>