Question

I’d like to be able to pass additional arguments to ADL from Flash Builder 4.5.1. In the “Debug Configurations” and “Run Configurations” windows there is the “Command line arguments” field, but that is for passing arguments to the application being run (with –), not to ADL itself.

I can easily launch the application with ADL manually, but afaik FB cannot attach to that ADL process afterwards.

The purpose is to pass settings like -extdir <path> to ADL.

Is there a way to get this done?

From ADL documentation:

— arguments Any character strings appearing after “–” are passed to the application as command line arguments.

Thanks in advance for any pointers.

Answer 1

I know I’m late to answer this question, but I was wondering the same thing. I am playing with Native Extensions, but am trying to avoid migrating my whole team to Flash Builder 4.6 just yet, so I’m desperate to debug native extensions while still using Flash Builder 4.5. Here’s what I did:

(I’m on a Mac. You can probably modify adl.bat in an equivalent way if you are on Windows)

1. Go into the FlexSDK/bin folder
2. Copy “adl” to “adl-original”
3. Create a new bash script called “adl” with the following contents:

#!/bin/sh

#First, get the full path to my own folder (ignores working directory):
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"

#Now call the original adl with the same parameters as were passed in to me ("$@"), 
#but pass in my extra parameter at the end : "-extdir blah-blah"
$DIR/adl-original "$@" -extdir ./META-INF/AIR/extensions

In my case, I wanted to add the “-extdir ./META-INF/AIR/extensions” parameter to every call of adl, but you should obviously replace my parameter with what you need.

If you want this to be a generic solution instead of hard-coding stuff into the adl script, you could make this script read the extra parameters from a file called “extraAdlParameters.txt” and then have it immediately delete the file. As part of your build process in FB4.5, you could make a script that adds the desired parameters to that same file. That way, you are only adding the extra parameters once per call to adl, and are not affecting other calls to adl with these extraneous parameters.