FlexBuilder not checking for errors in AS files

Question

FlexBuilder 2 isn't finding any errors in AS files that
aren't explicitly referenced in an MXML file for anyone in my
office. This seems like a pretty basic function everyone needs, so
I can't imagine it's not a huge bug....
To be more specific, I have a flex project set up with two
files in the root named SimpleTest.as and test.mxml. If test.mxml
is empty, I can write absolutely anything into the .as file and
flex builder won't locate any errors in real time. As soon as I
instantiate an instance of SimpleTest in my mxml file, however,
flex builder suddenly reports all of the problems in the problems
view, and we're good to go.
This is a huge pain from a development standpoint - I don't
want to have to keep an instantiation of a class just to find if
there are any errors in it. And if I'm not able to find errors in
real/development time, FlexBuilder becomes a glorified text editor
with the only real useful AS feature being code hints.
If the project is an ActionScript project instead of a Flex
project, flex builder will detect errors on AS files if they're in
the root package, but files nested in folders aren't checked for
errors unless an instance of the class exists in another
root-package object.
Is there anything we can do to fix this? Is anyone else
seeing this error?
Thanks.

Answer 1

Sorry guys, but the way Flex ignores unreferenced .as files
is just plain wrong, and it's also inconsistent. There... thats the
synopsis of this post, now the explanation.
In our app, we want to have a list of menu items that are
read in from the database. Each item consists of the man-readable
text and the name of a class that is normally derived from
TextWindow. The user clicks on a menuitem and the window appears.
Flex provides the function flash.utils.getDefinitionByName()
which will return the class definition for the given class name
supplied as a string. But it will only work if the class is loaded
i.e it has been referenced somewhere. To get around this, I have
had to create my own map of class names to class definitions. In
other words, I've had to rewrite getDefinitionByName.
quote:
Well, it makes sense to me that the IDE should ignore a file
if you're not actually using it.
Yes, but what the IDE doesn't know is that you may want to
create an instance of the class
without referencing it directly. getDefintionByName is the
proof that there was/is some intention to be able to do that. IMO
this is a reasonable thing to want to do, e.g if functionality is
enabled/disabled according to user security, then one would expect
to be able to dynamically create classes at runtime.
getDefinitionByName() should allow me to do that. After all, the
function exists to begin with, so it should work. But it only
partially works because the IDE doesn't load up unreferenced .as
code.
If the .as file appears in the project, it should be
compiled. Period. The fact that it is not referenced should not
determine whether or not it is compiled. getDefinitionByName would
then work as I reasonably expected it to work and allow dynamic
creation of classes.
The
Inconsistency I mentioned earlier is therefore that Flex
offers the getDefinitionByName but renders it pretty useless as you
have to reference the class anyway.
Finally all the other development languages I have used will
compile all source in the project regardless of whether or not it
is referenced. This includes C++, C#.NET and Visual Basic. So Flex
is definitely the odd one out here.