Posts Tagged ‘FlexBuilder’

How (not) to open Flash files from FlexBuilder 3 beta 2

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

For a while now I’ve had to manually right click on any fla files in my FlexBuilder projects then choose Open With then System Editor for them to open correctly. In FlexBuilder 2 simply trying to open the file would open a text editor in FlexBuilder with the binary file contents in it and FlexBuilder 3b2 would give me the following error:

Unable to open external editor null
(com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui.osx.FlashExternalEditor)

Reason:
Plug-in com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui was unable to load class
com.adobe.flexbuilder.ui.osx.FlashExternalEditor

But at least it was trying to load Flash. I just found a magic bullet workaround for getting this to work right every time in FlexBuilder 3b2 (at least for me).

  1. Go to the Flex Builder menu and choose Preferences…
  2. Expand General, then Editors and choose File Associations
  3. Choose *.fla in the File types list
  4. Choose Adobe Flash Editor in the Associated Editors list
  5. Click the Remove button to the right of the Associated Editors list
  6. Click OK

Now your fla files will open with the system editor (Adobe Flash hopefully) by default.

I’ve opened a bug with Adobe: FB-10670.

UPDATE: this is also needed and works fine for me with FlexBuilder 3 beta 3.

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