User Interface at Workday Inc.

Some of the Flex compiler warnings are more informational in nature i.e. they are not really warnings just information pointers, sort of like “are you sure this is what you want, if yes then ignore”.  I discuss two of them that directly affect many apps below –

 1.  One such so-called warning comes up when you do not specify an explicit scope for your variable or method.  For example –  

 Declaring a function as follows will give a compiler warning in flex –

public class Foo {

function bar():void {

            //whatever

}

}

The warning would read like this: “1084: function bar will be scoped to the default namespace: Foo.internal and will not be visible outside this package”.  Now this is useful information only if the developer wanted this function to be visible outside its package.  On the other hand, if the intended design was to not have this function visible outside the package, then the signature of the function is correct and specifying any of the scope keywords (public, private or protected) on this function just to get rid of the warning would be incorrect as that’s changing the design.  Package scope is common in modern object oriented languages such as Java and ActionScript 3.  Java compiler does not complain about it, AS compiler shouldn’t too.

2.  The other such warning that comes up very frequently in Flex has to do with bindings.  For example –

 Let’s say that I have a mxml component as follows:

<mx:Text text=”{label}” xmlns….>

            <mx:Script>

                        <![CDATA[

                                    public var label:String;

                        ]]>

            </mx:Script>

</mx:Text>

 Flex will give you a warning that changes to label will not be detected by data binding.  This is an issue only if the developer wants the variable to be bindable.  In many cases in an application where [Bindable] has not been specified for a variable, the developer did not want it to be bindable mostly because the variable will never change its value once it has been initialized or if the intent is that the change in value should not update the bound variable.  One way to achieve this is to manuelly update the value in AS code instead of specifying it as a bound variable in MXML.  That is not the idea case for people like myself who like the elegance of MXML and want to resist the temptation to write AS code.