The other Andrew Hunt

I’ve been working on a project with many SWF files.

To keep file size down, I’ve been using the “load-externs” option with mxmlc to exlude classes during compilation of SWFs that are loaded later in the application. This was working fine, and I could see that the classes were indeed being excluded.

On IE6/IE7 (of course!), I would consistently get the VerifyError saying that a certain class was not defined. On Firefox this worked flawlessly. If I cleared cache on the IE browsers, the file load was fine. If I reloaded the page without clearing the cache, I would consistently get the VerifyError.

We tracked this problem down to file load order, which is obvious in retrospect.

I use the handy Bulkloader class to load the SWFs and other assets. This class is supposed to load the files in the order specified. For some reason, the order was not consistent on IE browsers.

Solution: use the priority option in Bulkloader to make sure your library SWFs are loaded first.

If you’re seeing the VerifyError #1014 and excluding classes in your compile, its most likely a similar issue. Check that your files are being loaded in the order you expect!

I had some mysterious trouble with my MXMLC-generated SWFs and my attempts to exclude files. I thought it might be productive to try to exclude classes by compiling in the IDE.

In the ActionScript 3.0 settings for my FLA, I set a path to the correct SWC in the “External LIbrary Path” window.

The final SWF, however, did not exclude these classes at all.

Does anybody know if this feature actually works? Do I have to do something else to get this to work properly?

It would be a great feature if I could get it to work!

OK, back to using the mxmlc compiler I guess.