Flash Builder’s Lost Features: Call Hierarchy

Last week I had the pleasure to present to the first edition of gotoAndSki() conference, up north in Norway. During one of my sessions people said that it’d be a great thing if Adobe could present the Flash Builder new features in such a way that it makes easier to learn them. They suggested instead of just throwing big PDFs to the community, we could also have blog posts tackling one feature at a time. I think this makes sense; we are all too busy with current and upcoming projects to find the time to go through manuals.

So here I come and I start today a series of articles called Flash Builder’s Lost Features. Today I’ll present Call Hierarchy command. This command makes it easy to find all the places where a particular property/variable/function/method is used in your project. It works for ActionScript or Flex projects.

To use this feature, right-click the variable or method you are interested in and select Open Call Hierarchy.

When you do this, you should see in Flash Builder a new view (named Call Hierarchy) with all the occurrences of what you’ve selected. If you double-click an entry, Flash Builder will open the file where that entry can be found and you can inspect the code. Also, you can extend a node to see the call stack trace. And all of this can be done without having to run the project.

This is it for now. Like I said, it is a small and simple to use feature, but it is pretty powerful. In the next episode I will talk about Flash Builder’s Profiler.

June 18, 2010 | Filed Under Others 

Comments

7 Responses to “Flash Builder’s Lost Features: Call Hierarchy”

  1. 1. Danny Kopping on June 18th, 2010 1:20 pm

    Wow! That’s pretty awesome… Very helpful indeed!

  2. 2. Thomas Rühl on June 18th, 2010 1:54 pm

    good one, thanks for the hint!

    cheers, thomas

  3. 3. Øyvind Nordhagen on June 18th, 2010 4:11 pm

    Wow, that’s one great power feature that FDT doesn’t seem to have. #envy

  4. 4. Mihai Corlan on June 18th, 2010 4:20 pm

    So they were right :)
    There are features that are hidden!

  5. 5. Dev on June 19th, 2010 5:08 am

    Excellent Features, no more Find/Search throughout the project.

  6. 6. neo21 on March 11th, 2011 5:10 pm

    Nice. What version of flash builder are you using?

  7. 7. Mihai Corlan on March 11th, 2011 9:04 pm

    In this article I’m using 4.0 but the same applies for newer versions!

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