Building SWC with ANT

Problem Summary

You want to compile your swc using ant.

Solution Summary

Use flex ant tasks provided by adobe in flex SDK to compile your application.

Explanation

 

When deploying flex application we can use very powerful tool – ant. With his help we can launch applications, run command line tools, copy files and much, much more (see: http://ant.apache.org/manual/index.html)

Before we start you should install ANT on your flex builder if you have stand alone version.
See article “Installing Ant in Flex Builder 3” at :
http://blog.jodybrewster.net/2008/04/09/installing-ant-in-flex-builder-3/
 

After that, just create two files in project:
 

build.properties:

###### Flex Properties ##############################
# change this path to your flex sdk directory
# Use "/" in your directory path e.g. C:/FlexSDK/3.0.0
FLEX_HOME=C:/flex_sdk_4.0

###### Project Properties ###########################

src-dir=${basedir}/src

build.xml:
 

<project name="Ant build SWC sample" basedir="." default="build SWC">
 
 <!-- load user configuration properties -->
 <property file="build.properties" />
 
 <taskdef resource="flexTasks.tasks" classpath="${FLEX_HOME}/ant/lib/flexTasks.jar" />
 
 <!-- =================================
  target: build SWC  
  ================================= -->
 <target name="build SWC">
  <compc output="${basedir}/swc/sample.swc"
  include-classes="tom.hallo.CHalloWorld">
  <source-path path-element="${src-dir}" />
  </compc>
  </target>
</project>

First file build.properties, holds info about location FlexSDK and files structure in your project. Add flex sdk's jar and ant's jar to Window --> Preferences, Ant --> Runtime-->Add External JARs
Code in build.xml loads build.properties and run ant task compc to generate swc.

In Flex Builder, just drag and drop build.xml from Flex Navigator to Ant view and double “click build SWC” task