Now I’m not frequent user of the command line, but I know terminal (on my mac) a bit, so I just navigated to the bin directory of my Flex sdk and did this:

copylocale en_US nl_NL

Didn’t work. Terminal just sais:

-bash: copylocale: command not found

Turns out you have to call the copylocale command from the root directory of your sdk, and include the /bin in the command call, like this:

bin/copylocale en_US nl_NL

Damn command line tools, no one ever tells you this stuff.

Some more info on runtime localisation:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_3:Feature_Introductions:_Runtime_Localization

What is ANT?
You can do about anyting with ANT by creating an ANT Script (xml) that tells ANT what to do. ANT can do anyting with files (copy, paste, move, duplicate, extract zip files, etc) and with ANT you can execute applications which you would normally use through the command line (or Terminal on a Mac).

ASDoc ANT Script
Ok, back to the ASDoc ant script. Click “File -> New -> File” and create a file called asdocbuild.xml. Paste this code into the xml file:

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<project name="ASDoc build" default="createdocs">
 
	<property file="asdoc.properties"/>
 
	<target name="createdocs">
		<exec executable="${asdoc.dir}/asdoc" failonerror="true">
			<arg line="-doc-sources 'src/'"/>
			<arg line="-main-title 'Undercore, a Flash and Flex development framework'"/>
			<arg line="-window-title 'Undercore'"/>
			<arg line="-output 'docs'"/>
		</exec>
	</target>
</project>

Some explanation of what happens in the xml file above: Obviously it’s an xml file (line 1).  The project tag defines the projectname of the build and the default target to execute, in this case the target on line 5 called createdocs. This node contains an exec node which tells ANT to execute a command line statement with the arguments contained in the exec tag. This is the actual asdoc execution.

Before it executes any of the targets, it loads a properties file. You can define variables in a properties file, such as ${asdoc.dir} which is defined as asdoc.dir in the property file. This is the properties file content:

asdoc.dir=/Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.2.0/bin

Just create a file named asdoc.properties and paste the code above in it. Your project should look something like this:

Now right-click the asdocbuild.xml file and choose Run As -> Ant Build. Your documentation’s being created.

The same thing goes for Flex, but Flex has it’s own measuring and sizing methods. I’ve come to know that it’s a great thing as regards to performance, maintainability and scalability of your component to adapt to the Flex Framework.

In this case, I’ve extended a Flex component. The new Component contains an Away3D scene, which wants to take up the full width and height of my Flex Application. To solve this we need to override the updateDisplayList method. This method get’s called by the Flex Framework every time something in the measuring has changed. Here’s how it looks in code:

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override protected function updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth:Number, unscaledHeight:Number):void {
 
super.updateDisplayList(unscaledWidth, unscaledHeight);
 
// Set the clipping of the 3D scene to make sure only the visible elements are rendered,
// this is great improvement for the performance
var clipping:RectangleClipping = new RectangleClipping(-this.width/2, -this.width/2, this.width/2, this.width/2);
 
// Asign the clipping to the _view3D, in this case a private variable within my class
_view3D.clip = clipping;
 
// Remove the old mask if there is one
if (_mask != null) {
this.removeChild(_mask);
}
 
// Create a new mask
_mask = new Sprite();
_mask.x = this.x;
_mask.y = this.y;
_mask.graphics.beginFill(0xFF0000,1);
_mask.graphics.drawRect(0, 0, this.width, this.height);
_mask.graphics.endFill();
 
// Add it to the displayList
this.addChild(_mask);
// And assign the mask to the view3D
_view3D.mask = _mask;
 
// And center the view3D in the available space
_view3D.x = this.width / 2;
_view3D.y = this.height / 2;
}

So as you see above, it’s quite straighforward. The clipping in the beginning of the method is not necessary for the masking, but since only the masked area is being displayed, there’s no need to render the invisible parts of the view3D.