Question

I have a very complex Flash application (think Photoshop in Flash).

There is a lot of image manipulation, and all is working well with the exception of one bug.

The application has an undo/redo feature that sometimes throws an error. There is way too much code to paste here, but the issue revolves around this line of code:

trace("UNDO BMD: " + BeautyGlobal.undoArray[_undoSteps].bitmapData);
var newUndoData:BitmapData = BeautyGlobal.undoArray[_undoSteps].bitmapData.clone()

The trace statement displays:

UNDO BMD: [object BitmapData]
ArgumentError: Error #2015: Invalid BitmapData.
    at flash.display::BitmapData/clone()
    at Main/undoAction()
    at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
    at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
    at com.beautyCanvas.ui::Toolbar/undoClick()

So there is bitmapdata there, but it is not valid. This issue doesn’t preset itself all of the time. If I could detect if the bitmap data is valid, I can stop it from crashing the entire application. I have tried a few things:

• check the height of the BM Data (crashes the app with same error)
• looping through the BMD to get all of the properties… nothing comes up even before the error presents itself.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is most likely because your application is using too much memory and has hit a limit. Check Flash Player’s memory usage.

A way to catch and deal with this error is to simply use a try..catch block:

try {
  var newBitmapData:BitmapData = oldBitmapData.clone();
} catch (e:Error) {
  if (e.errorID == 2015) {
    // handle it
  } else {
    throw e;
  }
}

If you keep running into this error and can confirm that there is indeed a correlation with increased memory usage, then the one thing you want to do first is make sure that you are properly disposing of any discarded BitmapData objects:

// dispose first
myBitmapData.dispose();

myBitmapData = null;

Before you lose all references to a BitmapData instance, you want to dispose() it first.