Flex Stuff by Gilles Guillemin

I’ve been enjoying my time fighting pretty hard since yesterday with this awesome piece of c… that is ASDoc. Basically, it’s a user-friendly GUI command-line app provided with Flex sdks. Its purpose is to help give hell to the developer by automatically creating the API documentation of a project. The process is pretty much straightforward excruciating and above all the app is very reliable buggy.
Anyway, ASDoc is what people use to generate docs, and most of it it generates docs with AS classes AND MXML files. That’s a new feature of Gumbo (Flex 4) sdk and that was one of the reasons I kept fighting and not just dropped everything and simply used VisDoc. VisDoc works pretty well, is reliable, but doesn’t generate any documentation about mxml files. Also, it’s a Mac only software which is not perfect as my colleagues use Windows (idiots).
So basically the idea is to try and use ASDoc as much as the picky thing accepts to generate the documentation. And use VisDoc when it doesn’t.

The easiest (appreciate the italic) way to use it I’ve found so far was to use Eclipse’s External Tools. So, here is the walkthrough:

1. Download and install the latest version of Gumbo. I am using at the moment the latest milestone version: 4.0.0.4021
   Note: we are using Gumbo here only for its ASDoc app. Our projects will still remain (at least for a while) based on 3.1 / 3.2 sdks.

2. In Eclipse:
   

   Select External Tools configuration in Eclipse

3. In location, replace with the path of your version of the sdk. Then enter the following:
   In Working Directory:${project_loc}

   And in Arguments:
   -source-path ${project_loc}/src -doc-sources ${project_loc}/src -output ${project_loc}/asdocs -library-path “${project_loc}/libs”
   -library-path “/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/4.0.0.4021/frameworks/libs” -window-title “${project_name}” -main-title “${project_name}” -lenient
   (again, replace /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/4.0.0.4021/frameworks/libs by the correct path).

   

   External Tools configuration panel

Ok, now select the root of your project in the Flex Navigator, then go run your new External Tools template (RUN > External Tools > Generate ASDoc).

And pray in the hope everything goes fine… If (miraculously) so, then you should find a brand new asdocs folder in your project with (oh, joy) the long desired documentation.