To Cuddle or not to Cuddle :} setting curly brace defaults in my IDE

After a short stint of not understanding what the heck people were moaning about on twitter (re @jesterxl's comments about cuddling), and thanks to him, I came across Grant Skinner's post about curly braces.

I am personally a cuddler.  I find the code easier to read, and I am of the school of thought that less lines of code is better.  Also, to me logic dictates that if you are starting a block of code, you would emphasize that by showing me on the line that you are declaring the opening of that code, that the code block begins with the curly.  In Ruby, there are no curly's for code blocks, so it doesn't bother me there.

But what bothers me, and Grant mentioned it, is how Flashbuilder autogenerates non-cuddled code blocks. And he griped about it, asking that anyone who knows how to fix the problem please let him know.  Well, here's my quick fix, using Flashbuilder 4 on Eclipse 3.6 on OSX6.5:

-> Preferences (cmd + ,) -> Flash Builder -> Editors -> Code Templates -> ActionScript

For each of these classes, I manually updated the templates so that the curly braces all were at the end of the opening line for package, class and constructor, i.e.

package com.lordB8r.controller{
  public class TestClass{
    public function TestClass():{
    }
  }
}

and methods did the same thing:

private function runTestClass():void{
}

ahhh, breathe deeply, knowing that all auto-magically generated code in AS3 will now conform to my preferences.

And yes, I can export these settings, in case I don't want to manually change all of them for each instance of Eclipse (and then reimport them).

Now, I obviously am not smart enough to be the first person to have come up with this.  There is the following resources I found:

InsideRia's article by Greg Owen
FlexFormatter
ActiveTuts by Jesse Freeman
and the best example so far is someone who actually made real templates of what they use in their workflow:
FBB blogpost by Maxim Kachurovskiy

And you can quickly find your own by using lord google.

Resizing Dynamically Loaded swfs using swfloader

In my current project, I am using RobotLegs and a parent application to load in "modules".  However, I don't use modules, because frankly, I don't quite get why I should.  Instead, I have separate swfs that I can load, and pass information to them, if necessary.  The biggest frustration that I have is that when I resize the parent application, my child, which is a loaded swf, doesn't know it's stage has been resized, and thus doesn't resize itself.  To fix that, I tried a few different options, including resizing the loader, the system manager, the loaded application, the screen, everything!!!

The problem I was running into is that my loaded swf was getting it's size clipped.  This was unacceptable.

For example, if I loaded my swf into my app, if the window was sized at 700x400 (w x h), if I resized my window to something smaller, the controls inside the loaded swf would follow accordingly. However when I resized the window larger than 700x400, the controls would get clipped by an auto-assumed max size of the loaded swf's stage.

GRRRRRRR!!!!!!

So I have lost countless hours of sleep, including the time it's taking me to post this incoherent message.  But I feel I must share about resizing a loaded swf without scaling.   Right now I have some jerkiness in the movement, but it forces a scale and resize of the loaded swf's width and height.

I avoid using the _loadedSwf.scaleContent and _loadedSwf.maintainAspectRatio.  These together were fun to figure out, but the end result was that my controls were scaling, and I didn't want that.  If I turned off scaleContent, then nothing would resize.  If I turned off aspect ration, then things started looking wonky.

because I had added my _loadedSwf to a SkinnableContainer, and that container was getting resized, I wanted my _loadedSwf to update to that container's size.  On initialization I do use a method inside _loadedSwf.  And to use that, I have something like the following:

var loadedSM:SystemManager = SystemManager(_loadedSwf.content)
loadedSM.application["updateDimensions"](container.width, container.height);

This worked great for the initial setup, but resizing still didn't work.  I won't recount the countless hours I've tried to make it work.  Needless to say, and the reward for reading this post is to see that to make this work, I did the following on the resizeMyApp(), called by the parent application whenever an EVENT.RESIZE_EVENT is dispatched:

_loadedSwf.content.width = container.width;
_loadedSwf.content.height = container.height;
Object(_loadedSwf.content).setActualSize(container.width, container.height);
loadedSM.application["updateDimensions"] (container.width, container.height);

I got the idea on page 48 of this manual (Thank you Matt Horn!!!)

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/loading_applications.pdf 


These last 2 lines seem a bit hazy to me, but if I remove one of them, then the resizing doesn't work.  I do have some jerkiness that I need to work out, but the overall resizing now commits correctly.  I think there is something in the updateDisplayList() that I've missed, but somehow this makes the call work.