Import Flare Libraries

Question

Flare is an awesome data vizualization toolkit. Flare is a
collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of
interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build
basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and
more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language
and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the
Adobe Flash Player. Flare applications can be built using the free
Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe's Flex Builder IDE. Flare is based on
prefuse, a full-featured visualization toolkit written in Java.
Flare is open source software licensed under the terms of the BSD
license, and can be freely used for both commercial and
non-commercial purposes.
Now, I downloaded the
flare-prefuse
visualization toolkit, from the
flare-prefuse.org site.
Following the steps in the
Flare Tutorial,
for the life of me I can't seem to import the flare libraries into
the Tuturial project within Flex Builder.
How do you import projects into another project? I'm able to
import the libraries so that they appear in the Flex Builder's
Navigation pane. I go through the "
Importing a libarary with another project" steps mentioned
below. When I click "OK" to add a project, the project name (eg.
flare.util) does not appear in the Library Path window. Further,
when I use a statement to reference the library, such as import
flare.animate.Tween, the FB2 compiler returns an error, "Definition
flare.animate:Tween could not be found".
Specifically, the flare tutorial states:
Importing Libraries
Before proceeding, make sure you have the flare libraries
loaded as projects within Flex Builder. You should have already
unzipped the flare files into your main Flex Builder workspace
directory. The next step is to import them into the Flex Builder
environment:
- Make sure you are in the "Flex Development" perspective.
- Right click the navigator pane on the left.
- Select "Import..." in the popup menu.
- In the dialog, select "General > Existing Projects into
Workspace" and click the "Next" button.
- Use the "Select root directory" widgets to navigate to your
Flex Builder workspace directory
- You should now seen the flare projects listed in the
"Projects:" panel
- Make sure all flare.* projects are selected and then click
the "Finish" button.
You should now see all the flare projects in the Navigator
pane. You can now browse the source code for each of the
sub-libraries.
Overview of the flare libraries
Here is a quick overview of the various flare projects:
flare.animate: animation library (depends on flare.util)
flare.data: library for loading data sets, useful, but still
under development (depends on flare.util)
flare.demos: an application project showcasing a number of
visualization demos
flare.physics: a physics engine, useful for physical effects
or force-directed layout (no dependencies)
flare.query: a query processor for ActionScript objects
(depends on flare.util)
flare.util: a set of utility classes shared by all projects
(no dependencies)
flare.vis: the flare visualization components and operators
(depends on flare.util, flare.animate, and flare.physics)
If a project has a dependency, you will need to import all
dependent projects into your application. We now describe how to do
that.
Importing a library within another project
Now we need to adjust our project settings so that we can
make use of the flare libraries. Just follow these steps:
1. In the Navigator pane, right click the top folder of the
"Tutorial" project
2. Click "Properties" in the context menu
3. In the resulting dialog, click "ActionScript Build Path"
in the left panel (it should be the 3rd item from the top)
4. Click the "Library path" tab in the right panel
5. Click the "Add Project" button
6. You should now see a list of projects, including all the
flare libraries.
7. Select "flare.util" and then click "OK"
You've now added the flare.util libraries to your project,
and can use any of the classes it provides. Repeat steps 5-7 above
for the "flare.animate", "flare.physics", and "flare.vis" projects.
(We will be using the flare.animate classes in this part of the
tutorial, and then adding in the flare.vis classes in the next
part, so we might as well import them all now). "
My directory structure for the Tutorial project is:
C:\Documents and Settings\Ron Barrett\My Documents\Flex
Builder 2\Tutorial
Can you help to explain to me how to import the flare
libraries so that they are available to the Tutorial project?
Man, if you can help me out with this I'd be REALLY
grateful!!
All the best,
Ron

Answer 1

Hi Magicrebirth:
Jeff Heer, of UC Berkeley, responded to my question, which
was also posted on the SourceForge Flare forum. The following is
his reply, which solved my problem. The easy answer is simply to
download and install FlexBuilder beta version 3.
Sorry for your troubles! The tutorial was written and tested
with Adobe
Flex Builder 3 Beta, so one solution would be to use FB3
instead.
Another approach may instead be to do a clean import of the
projects.
To do this, first delete the following files in each flare
project:
.actionScriptProperties
.flexLibProject
.project
Next, you can manually set up each project. In Flex
Development mode,
right click in the Flex Navigator and select "New
> Flex Library
Project". Now create a new project. Flex Builder
acts strangely when
project names have a "." in them, so leave
the "." out of the name. For
example, type "flareutil" instead of
"flare.util". After typing the
name, click OK. There should now be a project named
"flareutil" in the
navigator pane.
Now rename the project: right-click the project and select
"Rename...".
Now add the "." back into name (for example
"flareutil" should become
"flare.util"). In a warning message pops
up, just dismiss it. The
project should now have the correct name and include the
files in the
flare.util folder.
Now we just need to setup the project settings. Right click
the project
and select "Properties". A dialog window
should appear. In the list on
the left, select "Flex Library Build Path".
Under the tab "Classes",
make sure the box next to the "flare"
package is checked (all sub
checkboxes should be checked as a result) -- this makes sure
all the
files are included with the project.
Finally, you need to set up any project dependencies. These
are
described in the Tutorial. For example, flare.animate has a
dependency
on flare.util. To specify this, click the "Library
path" tab in the
Properties dialog. Now click "Add Project"
and select the project to
add. After you've done that, the project should appear in the
"Build
path libraries:" list. Click the "Link
Type" setting under the newly
added project reference, click the "Edit"
button on the right, and
adjust the link type to "External". Now
repeat this for any other
project dependencies.
Repeat the above process for each of the included flare
projects. The
only difference is for flare.demos. For that project, create
a new
"ActionScript Project", NOT a
"Flex Library Project".
As you can see, this involves a bit of busy work, so
switching to Flex
Builder 3 may be simpler.
hope that helps,
-jeff