Static Actionscript code analysis possibilities

Question

I want to see class, function and variable/property, dependencies visually, like NDepend, but for ActionScript 2 or AS3 code.

Any programs or ideas?

Use doxygen in some way?

FlexUnit?

Answer 1

At runtime you an also get information about individual classes via the describeType method (Part of flash.utils). It returns an XML document that describes the class you give to it.

Answer 2

I was going to post a link to Big Kahuna Burger's Link Report Visualizer, but I see that darrinm has found a much better tool.

Still, could be of some use

LinkReportAIR

Answer 3

ItDepends, a Visual browser for class and package dependencies in Flex applications.

It lacks the visualization capabilities of NDepends but its a big step up from trying to make sense of link reports. Its source is there so if one was sufficiently motivated it could be extended with visualizations.

Answer 4

The Flex SDK compilers have a -link-report argument that will give you some good information about the classes compiled into the SWF and their dependencies.

See Examining Linker Dependencies from the Flex 3 documentation for more information.

Answer 5

Far from a complete solution, but to start you may want to use flex SDK ASDoc to generate the class path structure in a single XML (thanks to the -keep-xml -skip-xsl arguments).

Thereafter you could probably get a nice result if you have a play with graphviz (http://www.graphviz.org/Resources.php).

Automating it all via ANT and you're sorted ; )

Answer 6

Update Nov 2018:

It would appear that Structure101 (new download page) no longer has an ActionScript variant.

Original answer, links outdated:

Download Structure101g and select the Actionscript flavor after installing the software.

I've confirmed that it is able to map out class level and even function call dependencies in Flex/AS3 projects, and generate a visual map of the same.

Take a look at the attached screenshot.

(non-SSL link dead: i40.tinypic.com/e8qptu.png)

Hope that helps.