Debugging Client-Side Code in Flex Applications

Configuring the Flex Server for Client Debugging

When configured for debugging, Flex generates both a SWF and a SWD file (Flash debug file) for each requested MXML template. Flex stores SWD files in the same directory as SWF files. If SWD files and SWF files do not exist or do not match each other, fdb returns an error when attempting to debug an MXML template.

To enable the Flex debugger, you need to make several changes to the Flex server configuration file, flex-config.xml (typically located at c:\JRun4\servers\flex\WEB-INF\flex for JRun installations; depending on your application server, the location wills be different). First, debugging only works when you disable production mode. To ensure production mode is disabled, verify that the following setting is correct in your flex-config.xml file.

<production-mode>false</production-mode>

Next, you can force Flex to generate SWD files for each SWF by setting the generate-debug-swf in the flex- config.xml to true, as follows:

<generate-debug-swfs>true</generate-debug-swfs>

Moreover, you can also force Flex to create SWD files by appending the string to an MXML URL request, even if you disable generate-debug-swfs. To enable query string overriding, edit the flex-config.xml and verify that process-debug-query-params is enabled as in the following example.

<process-debug-query-params>true</process-debug-query-params>

With process-debug-query-params enabled, you can append ?debug=true to an MXML request to generate a SWD file for the MXML. The following is an example of this format:

http://mymachine/flex/debugging.mxml?debug=true

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