Working with the debugger versions of Flash runtimes

Adobe provides developers with special editions of the Flash runtimes to assist debugging efforts. You obtain a copy of the debugger version of Flash Player when you install Adobe Flash Professional or Adobe Flash Builder. You also obtain a utility for the debugging of Adobe AIR applications, which is called ADL, when you install either of those tools, or as part of the Adobe AIR SDK.

There is a notable difference in how the debugger versions and the release versions of Flash Player and Adobe AIR indicate errors. The debugger versions shows the error type (such as a generic Error, IOError, or EOFError), error number, and a human-readable error message. The release versions shows only the error type and error number. For example, consider the following code:

try
{
    tf.text = myByteArray.readBoolean();
}
catch (error:EOFError)
{
    tf.text = error.toString();
}

If the readBoolean() method throws an EOFError in the debugger version of Flash Player, the following message displays in the tf text field: "EOFError: Error #2030: End of file was encountered."

The same code in a release version of Flash Player or Adobe AIR would display the following text: "EOFError: Error #2030."

Note: The debugger players broadcast an event named "allComplete"; avoid creating custom events with the name "allComplete". Otherwise, you will encounter unpredictable behavior when debugging.

To keep resources and size to a minimum in the release versions, error message strings are not present. You can look up the error number in the documentation (the appendixes of the ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform) to correlate to an error message. Alternatively, you can reproduce the error using the debugger versions of Flash Player and AIR to see the full message.