Apache – Flex WSDL to Actionscript as ant task

apache-flexwsdl

Flex Builder 3 provides support to generate actionscipt from WSDL via the GUI ( Data->Import Web Service (WSDL) ) – but this sort of method requires that you check in the generated source. This is not desirable to us (we understand both sides of the 'should generated source be checked in' and we have decided that they should not) so we would like a method to generate the actionscript classes from an ant task. In this case, the WSDL would live in the file system.

Any ideas?

Best Answer

You could spent some time digging through Flex Builder's JARs to find the libraries they're using to do this, then invoke them from a very thin custom Ant Task you write yourself. The likelihood of this succeeding is small but might be worth investigating to save yourself a ton of work, just in case.

Short of that, I'd start with WSDL2Java to generate Java classes that represent your WSDL entities. The results won't necessarily be beautiful but you should get classes that adhere to the JavaBean spec. Then you could use one of the open source Java-to-ActionScript generators which include:

Granite Data Services' Gas3
Spicefactory's Pimento, which has Java->AS3 generation

I'm almost positive that Gas3 has an Ant Task you can use; not sure about Pimento.

Related Solutions

R – Creating bindable classes from WSDL for Flex 3

You can use one of several mechanisms to read the WSDL into a program and generate whatever flex code you need.

You can use one of the two ServiceDescription classes to read in a WSDL and examine its contents in terms of an object model;
You can use T4 Templates in Visual Studio with a bit of custom work to expose the WSDL to the template (possibly through the ServiceDescription class, as above)
You can use XSLT to transform the WSDL into the code you'd like
You can write some standalone program to read the WSDL (as XML or an object model) and just emit the text you want for your proxy code.

The bottom line is that, if you're having problems with the automation tools, then there are practical ways of creating your own.

How to automate the building of a Flex component library

You can do the following... it takes all the files from the source path and converts it to a format that the compc task can then use.

<fileset id="project.test.dir.fileset" dir="${project.test.dir}">
    <include name="**/*.as" />
    <include name="**/*.mxml" />
</fileset>
<property name="project.test.dir.fileset" refid="project.test.dir.fileset" />

<!-- Convert the test files into a compiler friendly format. -->
<pathconvert property="project.test.dir.path" pathsep=" " refid="project.test.dir.fileset">
    <compositemapper>
        <chainedmapper>
            <globmapper from="${project.test.dir}/*" to="*" handledirsep="true" />
            <mapper type="package" from="*.as" to="*" />
        </chainedmapper>
        <chainedmapper>
            <globmapper from="${project.test.dir}/*" to="*" handledirsep="true" />
            <mapper type="package" from="*.mxml" to="*" />
        </chainedmapper>
    </compositemapper>
</pathconvert>

<compc headless-server="true" default-frame-rate="${flex.default-frame-rate}" debug="${flex.compiler.debug.mode}" output="${build.swc.dir}/${test.component.name}.swc" include-classes="${project.test.dir.path}" directory="false">
    <source-path path-element="${project.test.dir}" />
    &dependencies;
</compc>

We use it to produce swcs for testing purposes.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

R – Creating bindable classes from WSDL for Flex 3

How to automate the building of a Flex component library

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