Import ASDocs into FDT

Posted 26 August 2010 by

Importing ASDocs into FDT is a great help, because at any point you can press F1 and the related ASDocs will open in your help panel. Unfortunately Adobe changed the way the supply their ASDoc with CS5, it now comes with Adobe Community Help (AIR app that updates/manages all Adobe products help files). With FDT4 M4 you can’t import these new help files from CS5, due to Adobe changes. I have file a feature request on FDT’s jira, please vote for it.

I really like this FDT feature, but I had to come up with a temporary solution to this problem.

1. Download the ASDocs

  • AS3LCR – Sorry, had to dual pack it. So extract the ZIP and then extract the RAR somewhere on your computer.

2. Import/Update help in FDT

Go to Preferences -> FDT -> Tools -> Flash Help. Under the “Advanced Settings” section at the bottom click “browse…”. Path to where you extracted the AS3LCR folder and select it.

Click “Update Help” to start the updating process, it might take a while, but be patient it’s worth it. You’ll be prompted to restart FDT once the process is complete.

3. Try it out and have fun!

To use this all you need to do is; put your cursor on the class/keyword/function/property/whatever you’d like help with and press F1. Simple as that!

Here I’m viewing my ColourFilter class, it’s got a ColorMatrixFilter protected property, but I can’t remember what all the properties of the ColorMatrixFilter mean!!! What do I do??? Put my cursor on ColourMatrixFilter and press F1.

Now I can see the search results of help for ColorMatrixFilter (there might be more than one result, e.g. put your cursor on “class”, you’ll see keyword “class” and the class “Class”. hehe), now just click on what you want to see:

Great! Now you have the ASDocs where they matter most, quick and easy! Really useful for those everyday things a person forgets, in my case I always need to check what the parameter order is of Array splicing! I always forget!

Hope you’ve found this useful! If I’ve missed something important, please leave a comment! :)

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  • http://www.ericpriou.me Eric Priou

    Great ! I missed this feature for a while…
    How did you achieve to anderstand the way FDT parses asdocs ?

    • http://doesflash.com Matan Uberstein

      :) Didn’t have to understand! The download above is standard ASDocs generated from the asdoc tool. But I copied it from a CS4 installation. So I cheated. :)

      Thanks for the comment! :D

  • http://www.ericpriou.me Eric Priou

    Pretty clever !
    I wonder if it’s possible to get Flex’s one running in there too !?

  • http://doesflash.com Matan Uberstein

    :D I did the same!!! hehehe. It’s what lead me to write this post, probably should have mentioned that trying to import the new docs doesn’t work.

    One of my attempts were to intercept Adobe Community Help’s update function, it actually downloads a zip of the html docs and then extracts into a temp folder. I tried importing it, lead to epic fail!

    No parsing error, just got an error when I opened the docs by pressing F1. :mrgreen:

    • http://www.ericpriou.me Eric Priou

      okay… and how did you re-import the api next ?

      • http://www.ericpriou.me Eric Priou

        I only achieve to include the FlashCS4 API from /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/fr_FR (osx)
        Maybe someone at powerflasher will tell what is parsed in order to create the /Applications/FDTEnterprise/plugins/com.powerflasher.fdt.doc.flash_3.2.0.1001/helpToc_mmflash.xml file.
        In fact, this is the table of content of the help in Eclipse…

  • Peder Nielsen

    For some reason fdt won’t remember my setting after closing the preferences. Anyone know why? It worked in fdt 3.

    • http://doesflash.com Matan Uberstein

      Could be folder permissions thing. Not sure where FDT4 saves this kind of information, but I’ll need more info on your problem to be able to help. Drop me a DM on Twitter.

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  • http://www.rumblingskies.com Erik van Nieuwburg

    It’s really important to select the right folder. When selecting the folder named “Flash_10.0″, FDT will throw an error when opening the help view with a huge stacktrace. Make sure you select the folder named “AS3LCR” and it will work fine then.

    Cheers,
    Erik

    • http://doesflash.com Matan Uberstein

      Indeed so, thanks for pointing that out! :mrgreen:

  • http://hawaiiflash.org John Barrett

    Thanks matan!

    I tried to get the flash CS 5 docs to work, but could not at least I can still have this, thank sos much for your post :)

  • FZE

    i found a free as3 tutorials for beginners, very very useful http://www.as3tutorial.com, you must check it

  • Juonio

    Absolutely great! Thanks!

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