The Shape of Frustration...

All I want to do is draw a frickin' arrow.

Clearly, this is a job for Flex's "Shape" class. So I write a nice little subclass of Shape called Arc, which draws a circle-segment from beginAngle to endAngle. The details aren't relevant, because the code never gets far enough for the details to matter.

In the test application's MXML code, I add an Arc object:

a:arc id="theArc" width="300" height="200" y="0" x="0"

No problems there; the Arc object is instantiated, its constructor is called, all is spiffy-keen. I'll just set the arc's radius to half of either the Shape object's width or height, whichever is less. No worries, right?

Except that, when the constructor is called, the width and height of the Arc are both 0 (zero). Excuse me? Well, maybe that's because its properties haven't been initialized yet. No worries; there's a handy-dandy event called "CREATION_COMPLETE" that one can listen for, just for this purpose.

But noooooo. CREATION_COMPLETE is an event of class FlexEvent, and Shapes don't post events of that class. Reading the documentation for the Shape class and its ancestors, there appears to be no equivalent event.

Well, fine, whatever, I'll write a brutal hack: in Arc's constructor, I'll (a) set the radius to NaN (Not a Number), (b) add a listener for events of type ENTER_FRAME (which ARE available to Shapes), and (c) in that listener's code -- which gets called very frequently, which is why this is such a brutal hack -- check the radius, and if it's NaN, set it to the proper value, based on the arc's width and height. Disgusting, perhaps, but it ought to work.

But noooo. When the code gets to the ENTER_FRAME event, the width and height of the shape are still zero. WTF? I check the Shapes docs, and yes, they have width and height properties. For some reason, they just aren't being initialized from my MXML.

This is totally bizarre...but it gets worse.

As a test, I set the width and height of the arc explicitly in the ENTER_FRAME code, as follows:
width = 162;
height = 100;

So, Mr. Smarty-Pants Flex Framework, you don't to initialize my parameters? @#$%^* you, I'll initialize them myself.

But noooo! I step through the execution of the code with the debugger, and to my amazement, the above code does not change the values of width and height! *Other* stuff changes; for example, the value of the Arc's inherited "transform" property, previously null, points to a flash.geom.Transform object after the call to "width = 162;" and the value of the inherited property "visible" changes from false to true...but the width property remains zero! Same with the height property. WTF?

OK, so I'll just step through the Shape code, and that of its ancestors as necessary, to figure out what the @#$%^*& is going on. Source code is the ultimate documentation, right?

But noooo! Shape's code isn't accessible using Eclipse's usual click-on-the-class-name-and-its-source-file-opens mechanism. Every time I do the click, instead of seeing the source code, I get a @#$%^ alert titled Code Navigation Error telling me that

"Source code could not be found for [the Flex class I clicked on] in /eclipse/Adobe Flex Builder 3 Plug-in/sdks/3.2.0/frameworks/libs/player/10/playerglobal.swc."

@#$%^*&! Mother-@#$%^&-ing piece of @#$%!

OK, fine, whatever. Om Mani Padme Hum. I am One with the Universe. That which does not kill me, and all that.

Screw width and height, anyway. Who needs 'em. I'll just draw an arc with hard-coded numbers.

Nothing is drawn.

Well, maybe my arc-drawing code is wrong. I'll just call the built-in drawCircle() method instead, just to see that i can draw SOMETHING.

Nothing.

Do I have my graphics environment set right? Yep, I'm calling lineStyle(5) to set a wide black line, and beginFill(0) to fill the circle with black. Nothing.

The source code for some of Flex's classes is available -- UIComponent, for example -- but not for others. Not for the ones I need now. Googling "Code Navigation Error" and "Source code could not be found for" has turned up no fixes, workarounds, or brutal but embarassingly-effective kludges.

So, I'm dead in the water. I simply cannot figure out how to draw a Shape in Flex.

Here's a stripped-down version of the app, with just a tiny MXML file and a short, heavily commented TestDraw.as class that shows the problems:



Of course, the application does absolutely nothing.

Furthermore, I still can't get the @#$%^&* "View source" menu item to work. In the sample app above, for example, it insists on trying to find a file at "http://www.igetitmusic.com/blog/srcview/index.html", even though the app is at "http://www.igetitmusic.com/blog/SWFs/Tweener/Tweener.swf". I have not been able to find *any* documentation -- not one word -- on how to set this pathname.

For example, the book "Flex 3: Training from the Source" -- which is not a bad book, overall -- has a chapter titled "Deploying Flex Applications." Sounds perfect, right? Unfortunately, like everything else I've been able to find on this topic, the chapter says "choose Project -> Export Release Build, and you're done!" -- when, actually, that's just the first step. Executing the "Export Release Build" command produces a bunch of files in the project's bin-release folder. Cool! But...now what? Which files need to be copied to the file server? How *exactly* do I tell a web page to include the resulting Flash doohickey? Should I tell the web page to include the doohickey.swf, the doohickey.html, or one of the other files in the doohickey project's bin-release folder? And how, for the Holy Love of God, does one define the path to the doohickey's source code?

I am not frustrated by computer programming. I LOVE computer programming. What is frustrating is NOT being able to do computer programming due to chickenshit problems like those above.

THAT is *incredibly* frustrating...