Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 68. Project Documenting with ASDoc

When developing for Adobe Flex, you may find it necessary to create reference documentation for your applications. Whether you are creating reference materials for application maintenance, or API documentation for a redistributable .swc file, the Flex framework provides the tools you need to automatically generate documentation based on your Flex project code.

This chapter will examine the ASDoc program that accompanies the Flex framework. The following sections will explain what ASDoc is, how to use it, and how to customize your generated documentation.

What Is ASDoc?

ASDoc is a tool that is packaged with the Adobe Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) that is used to generate reference documentation for your Flex applications. ASDoc scans your Flex and ActionScript code and generates HTML-based documentation based on your classes, their public properties and methods, their metadata attributes, and formatted comments within your code.

If you have ever seen the Flex API reference, then you have first-hand exposure to the generated HTML output of the ASDoc tool. The ASDoc tool outputs a series of HTML files that mimic the directory structure of your code. It also outputs a HTML frame-based interface for easy navigation, with an index of package structures, index of classes, and an alphabetized index of all the HTML content generated from your Flex project code. Figure 68-1 shows sample generated ASDoc documentation.

Figure 68-1. Figure 68-1

Using ...