Connecting Flex to Content Debugger

Yesterday my trial of Flex Beta 3 expired, forcing me to finally uninstall/reinstall the Flex 3 final release. A lost my beautiful custom perspective and all those plug-ins I had grown to love… sigh.

The worst of it was that I the reinstall brought the full wrath of the evil “Waiting for Flash Player to connect to debugger” error of doom. I looked around online for anwers — none. The only documented solutions were to try to reinstall Flex and insure I was using a debug version of the player. I was on my own.

How did I solve this issue?! Well I didn’t… sort of.

Daniel had helped Chris with a problem like this before though. Turns out that the problem stems from an unlikely place. When you uncheck “Generate HTML wrapper file” for an ActionScript project - which we always do - Flex assumes whatever you set as your system default application to launch SWFs. For example, if you set Flash Authoring as the app and then hit “Debug Project” in Flex, it’ll kick open Flash CS3 and go. I’ll only say this is an issue for me because there’s no documentation of that anywhere, at least that I can find. It’s a bug by virtue of obscurity.

Compounding the problem is that OSX seems to get easily confused if two applications share the same ID. Such as “Flash Player.app (9.0.115)” and “Flash Player.app (9.0.115)”, with the second one being the content debugger. Confusing, right?

I was able to determine that the standalone player had somehow defaulted to the former (regular ye ol’ Flash Player) and that I could not set the latter (debug Flash Player) to default, since my Mac thought both applications were the same thing. I had to delete the regular one, which is fine since I’ll never use it anyway. And now Flex works properly… no more connection issues.

March 19th, 2008 by Jamie / 5 Comments
flex

Comments on “Connecting Flex to Content Debugger”

Yes this is an annoying issue for sure - I’ve hit it several times. There does not seem to be a way to determine or specify which Flash player Flex builder uses to run swfs. The best solution I’ve found when getting the ‘cannot find debugger’ message is to run the flash player uninstaller, then install the latest flash debug player.

felix on March 20th, 2008 at 7:07 pm

Just got a similar error here: “Flex Builder requires a more recent version of the Flash Player. You might need to install the Flash Player or reinstall Flex Builder.”

The solution (on windows) is to set the system default application for opening SWFs to point to the latest debug player. Right click a SWF in explorer to set the deafult app. It may be in C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe Flash CS3Playerssa_flashplayer_9_debug.exe. if not download it from adobe.

felix on May 1st, 2008 at 8:50 pm

I was having this problem too, and I’m not willing to remove all copies of my Release Flash Player. Here’s what I did (I’m running Leopard - the names of menu items might be different in older versions of Mac OS):

1. I copied /Applications/Adobe Flex Builder 3/Player/Flash Player to my home directory, and renamed it to “Debug Flash Player” (make sure to COPY it, not MOVE it).
2. I right-clicked on my Debug Flash Player (not the original, but the copy) and selected “Show Package Contents”
3. In the new Finder window, I opened Contents, then I opened Info.plist (note: since I have the Mac OS developer tools installed, I have an application called Property List Editor that can be used to edit plist files. However, they should be ordinary XML, and should be editable in any text editor).
4. I changed the “Bundle identifier” key (or CFBundleIdentifier if you are using a text editor) from “com.macromedia.Flash Player.app” to “com.macromedia.Flash Player.app.debug”. Then I saved my changes. This causes Mac OSX to see it as a completely different application.
5. I waited a few minutes for the Mac to notice my change. There are some triggers that cause the Mac to see the change; try right-clicking on the Debug Flash Player application, and select “Get Info”.
6. Right-click on any .swf file, and select “Get Info”.
7. In “Open With”, select “Debug Flash Player”.
8. Click “Change All…”

That should be it. You might want to restart Flex Builder to make sure it sees the change, but then you should be good. Hope that helps.

Dan on June 17th, 2008 at 12:33 pm

Dan, that is a great solution. I’m going to implement that myself.

Jamie Kosoy on June 17th, 2008 at 1:00 pm

I also faced similar problems.But after goin through some posts I did a work around.When window is showing that it is trying to connect to Debugger..at that time stop the connection by clicking on the red square box(stop icon)…and then click again debug your application.It works for me

Rajesh.Bhadra on August 22nd, 2008 at 10:13 am

Connecting Flex to Content Debugger

Comments on “Connecting Flex to Content Debugger”

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