Is there a way to get FlexBuilder 3 to treat a project as an Application and a LIbrary?

Question

My team builds reusable libraries for other (internal) software development teams. We use FlexBuilder 3 as our development environment. Our SCM standards state that these projects must include test harnesses and a unit test runner, and (of course) we want to be able to use the debugger. For that reason, all the projects are Applications.

Our build scripts (used primarily by the CI system and for release deployment) build our actual libraries which works great. This approach is used so that FlexBuilder is not required to actually build our production artifacts (on the command line).

The problem is this - in order to have add a FlexBuilder Project to the Library Path for an Application it must be a Library Project. I have tried adding a nature to the project that we want included, but haven't gotten it to work yet. You would want to do that if you wanted to debug source files in another project.

A simple (yet annoying) work around is to include the source folder of the "library project" as a source folder in the "application project." It's annoying because it takes multiple steps to swap between a swc of the "library project" and the source folder of the project itself.

Answer 1

Assuming it is possible, I'd suggest adjusting your SCM standards to allow test harnesses and unit test runners to exist in other projects. Simply mandate that any library project must include a companion test project.

Answer 2

I don't know that this is going to make it any easier, but I would actually make the library and the testing harness seperate projects. This would allow you to source control each and would solve your problem with flexbuilder. Its not going to make it easier to work with, but it will be cleaner and the easiest to update.

Answer 3

I didn't totally understand the description of your situation, but if it's helpful, I'll describe how we have organized our Flex projects. The majority of our application code is contained within a SWC ("library") project. We then create two SWF ("application") projects - a "shell" application which represents the final output SWF, and a test harness FlexUnit 2 application. Both of these SWF projects reference the SWC project using a source path. Using this approach has made it trivial to enable unit testing for the application codebase in the SWC.

Answer 4

I would also suggest breaking this up into 2 projects. Have 1 library project and 1 application for the tests and the testrunner.

On a sidenote: FlexBuilder 4 will have support for running FlexUnit tests in the IDE, for both Flex applications and Flex library projects. So you won't have to maintain an application just for the sake of running the tests.