Have you as a developer ever wanted to deploy an Adobe Air application and include files with the installation? Say an XML file for settings and the like? Well, you can include files well enough (to the applicationDirectory), but if you want to write back to that file you’ll get an error. You see, files in the applicationDirectory are read-only.

So what do you do? You’ll need to read that file in the applicationDirectory and then copy it over to the applicationStorageDirectory… or desktopDirectory or even the documentsDirectory. Then you’ll be able to read and write to the file.

The snippet below sets up a reference to a test text document I included in an AIR application. It exists in the protected applicationDirectory. Then the destination (of applicationStorageDirectory) is referenced. If the file doesn’t already exist in the destination location, the one in the applicationDirectory is copied over to the applicationStorageDirectory… and traces “Copy Done” for me.

If you ever wanted to reset the settings file, all you would need to do is to copy over that original included Test.txt file to your applicationStorageDirectory again, over-writing the one that was already there. I didn’t see anything like this in my Google searches, but I did hear of the technique. Here is a little code that shows it in action.

var testFile:File = File.applicationDirectory.resolvePath("Test.txt");
			
//Copy the file over
var destination:File = File.applicationStorageDirectory;
destination = destination.resolvePath("Test.txt");
//Only copy the file from the installation bundle if it doesn't exist in the applicationStorageDirectory
if( !destination.exists ){
	if( testFile.copyTo(destination,true)){
		trace("Copy done");
	}
}

One thing to note – on a Mac, the applicationStorageDirectory exists here: username/Library/Preferences//Local Store/

Of course it exists elsewhere on a PC and Linux, but the applicationStorageDirectory reference takes care of that for you on the different operating systems. You should check your Local Store just to make sure it’s doing what you need it to do.

I have just discovered the ServerSocket class and I have made an AIR2 (required) server socket application with it. I’ve tested it locally so far (127.0.0.1, 0.0.0.0 ) and it seems to be working fine with a regular application I made using Socket to talk with it. I tried getting another copy of the socket app to talk to the socket server from another machine on the network, but I think a LAN might work better for testing at the moment since I don’t know the dynamics of the huge network that exists at work.

Continue reading “I have discovered flash.net.ServerSocket and it’s sticky sweet.”

I am creating an AIR application that spawns a new window, so there is a main application window and also another window. One can manipulate data in either window, and data is synchronized between the windows. So when I adjust data in the main window, I update the UI and data that’s in the secondary window.

The main window is a document class, and a class represents that which sits in the secondary window. I have updating methods in the secondary class so it’s easy to call them from the document class and have the magic happen.

However, if I change things in my secondary window, I update the UI there and the local copy of the underlying data, and need to tell the document class to do the same. This should be using a database or something so there is only ever one copy of the data both consume, but I was feeling lazy.

Anyway, after pounding my head for 30 minutes on how to access the main window and it’s document class from the class sitting in the spawned window of the AIR application, I finally figured it out.

import flash.desktop.*;
var who = NativeApplication.nativeApplication.openedWindows[0].stage.getChildAt(0);
who.callTheMethodInDocumentClass();

And that does it. You could also just do the following too:

Anyway, enjoy.