Where can I find the official description of Flex html-template and output folder structure?

Question

I'm looking for an official Adobe page explaining the ins and outs of the various directories used in Flex Builder, namely html-template, bin-debug and bin-release.

There's a lot happening in these folder: folders get created and deleted, files get copied around automatically, or not, as seems to be the case with AIR apps. I'm looking for specific information on settings that control this behaviour, documented intention of the folder structure etc. In short, I'm trying to understand a part of Flex workflow that seems to work in unpredictable and completely undocumented ways.

I'm not looking for help in organizing project assets, I'm more curious about how the semi-automatic output folders work, and how to affect their configuration.

Answer 1

I daresay you will not find this official documentation because Adobe considers this their buisiness—literally. Do read this December 2008 article “Flex best practices – Part 2: Development practices”; in the “Handling Assets” section you will see a recommendation for a folder structure that looks very close to what I think you are looking for...

Answer 2

I would check out these pages in the official documentation:

Flex Application Structure, Building Overview, and Application Deployment

The short, off-the-top-of-my-head answer would be:

• html-template is aptly named, and stores the HTML "wrapper" or "container" for the actual Flash object. If you need to do "standard" HTML/Javascript design/interactions around your Flash/Flex application, you modify index.template.html inside html-template and add external CSS, JS, etc, to that folder.
• bin-debug is the version of your app compiled for debugging purposes. So it takes everything in html-template and copies it to bin-debug while compiling all the SWFs that comprise your application.
• bin-release is very similar to bin-debug but is populated through the Flex Builder release process and provides additional options like "view source". I have actually just copied straight from bin-debug to a demo server without trouble before, but I'm sure that's a bad idea for actual deployments.

The only other thing I would add is that Flex Builder tries to create the debug builds as quickly as possible, and so it only copies or compiles the files it thinks have changed...and sometimes it misses some. A Project->Clean... will force all the files to be re-copied/compiled into bin-debug.

Answer 3

This link might be useful for you. http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/wrapper%5F01.html