Flex Builder Shortcuts

By Yakov Fain	Article Rating:
July 21, 2006 10:00 PM EDT	Reads:	21,557

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Adobe Flex Builder has many convenient keyboard commands and hints that make your programming faster. You can see the complete list of all available shortcuts by pressing Ctrl-Shift-L. But this is a list of Flex Builder shortcuts and hints that I use on a regular basis.

1.If you see a little asterisk in the tab with the your file name, this means that this file has some unsaved code changes.

2.Pressing Ctrl-S saves the file and compiles your code. If saving the file does not generate any messages, it’s the good news: your code does not have compilation errors.

3.Highlight the name of the class or a function and press the button F3 on your keyboard. This will take you to the source code of this class.

4.If some of the lines are marked with red error circles, move the mouse over the circle and Flex Builder will display the text describing this error.

5.Press Ctrl-Space to get context-sensitive help.

6.Alt + / will complete the name of the variable or a class after you typed in a couple of its first letters.

7.Press Ctrl-F11 to run the last-launched program again. Hit F11 to run the program in a debug mode.

8.Place the cursor after a curly brace and Flex Builder will mark the matching brace.

9.Highlight a line or a block of code and press Alt-ArrowUp or Alt-ArrowDown. The selected code will move up or down.

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10.Alt and arrow keys moves from one open class tab to the next one.

11.Ctrl-H will open a popup to search on multiple files, and Ctrl-F will let you find text in the open file.

12.To copy a class from one project to another, select the class and press Ctrl-C. Select the destination package and press Ctrl-V.

13.Highlight the MXML tag or ActionScript class and press Shift-F2. This will open a screen with the language reference help on the selected element.

14.Highlight a block of code and press Ctrl-Shift-C to comment out the selected block of code.

15.Ctrl-Shift-D inserts the <![CDATA[ ]]> block in your code.

16.To select surrounding containers, select a GUI control and press F4.

17.If your project relies on the code from external libraries, right-click on the project name, select Properties | Build Path and press the button Add SWC.

18.As you change you code in the editor, Flex Builder puts a vertical purple bar on the left of each modified line. This is quite handy if you’d like to have a quick look at the new code before pressing the button Save.

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Published July 21, 2006 – Reads 21,557
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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More Stories By Yakov Fain

Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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