What is the class that you used that parses the XML? is that in the flex sdk directory as plain text? On Jan 14, 2016 1:34 PM, "Alex Harui" <aha...@adobe.com> wrote:
> Hi, > > I spend the last few days creating a proof-of-concept that FlexJS and the > Falcon compiler can support limited "live" editing of MXML. I've never > used Design View in FB, but when tweaking the UI for Flex apps, I often > find myself in a cycle of: edit some values in the mxml, save it, reload > the app, make more edits, etc. Each time, the app has to be reloaded to > see the changes. "Live" editing allows you to see certain changes without > reloading the app. The POC handles a few scenarios that involve MXML > states. > > It is kind of hard to demo, but I think these are the steps: > > 0. Download Apache FlexJS 0.5.0 (or the 0.6.0 nightly) and install it as > an SDK in FB. > 1. Download this FB project: > http://home.apache.org/~aharui/MXMLLiveEditing/DataBindingTest.fxp > 2. Download this FB project: > http://home.apache.org/~aharui/MXMLLiveEditing/MXMLLiveEditAgent.fxp > > 3. Import both projects into FB. > 4. Run MXMLLiveEditAgent. > 5. In the MXMLLiveEditAgent UI, select the MyInitialView.mxml file from > the DataBindingTest project. > 6. Hit the Watch button. > 7. Run DataBindingTest. > 8. Make and save a change to MyInitialView.mxml > > When the file is saved, a few seconds later, the changes should be > reflected in DataBindingTest. This POC has a white list of properties, so > you can edit width, height, x, y, label, text and style properties. And > you can edit state-bound properties like height.showAll in the TextArea > tag. > > Remember that styles in FlexJS are like HTML styles, so you can add, for > example, style="marginLeft:90" to one of the tags. > > This is just for tweaking the visuals of your app. You can't edit binding > expressions or event handlers or add or remove new components. If you do > the POC will fail. A more robust version would probably detect such > changes and tell you to refresh the app. Also, if you save illegal XML, > the POC will fail. A more robust version would also watch the output SWF > to see if it changes in order to know the MXML edit didn't have syntax > errors. > > The way this works is that there is a plugin added to MyInitialView that > communicates with the MXMLLiveEditAgent. The MXMLLiveEditAgent is > monitoring the last-modified date on the file. When it changes, it loads > the MXML and compares it to the last copy and transmits changes to the > plugin that applies them to the app. Certain scenarios like state-bound > properties and state-bound components can be handled in because the Falcon > compiler converts a lot of the MXML into data structures that the plugin > can find and modify. It isn't clear that you could do this in the regular > Flex SDK without finishing up Falcon compiler support in the regular Flex > SDK. > > Also, none of this really requires FB. You can unzip the FXP files, build > everything yourself and edit the MXML with a text editor and it still all > works. > > Future work (hopefully by other volunteers) would be to handle changes to > CSS syntax, watch multiple files at once, and swap out the LocalConnection > to use sockets so you could "live" edit an mobile app on a device, or have > an IDE communicate directly with the running app. > > Anyway, let me know what you think. I'm off to work on other things. > > Thanks, > -Alex > >
