Flash Builder Debugger + Apache ANT

I guess this topic has been blogged a thousand times, but even with a number of year’s worth of experience using Apache ANT, I’ve never successfully got Debug output in the Flex / Flash Builder Console window. Obvious, the debugging console in Flex, is fundamental to developing applications, so having finally found the solution, I thought I’d document it here.

By going into your project properties in Flash Builder and selecting the ‘Builders’ tab, you’ll see a list of the different, er.. Builders that you can use to er…. build your application. By default, you’ll probably only see the ‘Flex’ builder in there. But by clicking add, and selecting ‘Ant Builder’ you’ll now have the capacity to build with ANT, and debug in your console. Well, not quite as simple as that. I tried this on numerous occasions with Flex Builder, but to no avail. It simply would never work. Have only recently tried again with Flex’s latest incarnation — Flash Builder 4 — and it now miraculously works!

I may well be that my ANT scripts have evolved somewhat since last trying, but it really is a simple process now. Just edit the new Ant Builder you’ve added, giving it the path for your main build.xml. This is an obvious point, yet I’ll make it anyway. Make sure this build.xml is your debug version. Nothing’s going to happen unless -debug=true in your mxmlc arguments.