Additional compiler arguments – debug only code

Many times you look something up, do it once and think cool I’ll remember that as it’s simple. Then 1 year later you’ve forgotten the syntax and you can’t find that help/blog page where you learned about it the first time.
Well I needed to add in some debug code that would only be there for debugging, and the last thing I want to do when building a release version is to scan through the code to remove it. So the ideal way is to use a conditional compiler argument.

So in Flashbuilder, under the project properties and then the Flex compiler properties you’ll see something like this

So if you had the following defined, -define=CONFIG::DEBUG,true -define+=CONFIG::SOMETHING_ELSE,false

Then in code you could do the following.

    CONFIG::DEBUG
    private var test : Boolean;

    CONFIG::SOMETHING_ELSE
    private function somethingElse() : void
    {

    }

The variable and function code will only be included if the compiler argument is true. So in the above example if you called the function ‘somethingElse()’ then this would generate a build error as somethingElse() doesn’t exist. Change the argument to true and it will build fine.

[ad name=”ad-1″]