The curious case of the disappearing Flex import statements

Now call me old fashioned, but I like things to work the way they’re meant to work. When things go awry, usually my first port of call is a quick sanity check to establish that I’m not the culprit.

Now in the case of Flex Builder, it’s had me questioning my sanity of numerous occasions! Certain import statements continually vanish upon compilation, even when the class in question hasn’t been touched.

Reminiscent of an episode of Tales of the Unexpected, the flash.net.navigateToURL import statement simply vanishes and throws a “Call to a possibly undefined method navigateToURL” error.

I gave up using the handy old ‘Organise Imports’ shortcut in Flex Builder a while ago, due to it chomping already added valid imports and flatly refusing to add new required statements. But this is a step too far. This continually messing with my melons man, completely destroys any line of thought and focus on the task at hand.