How do you use environment variables in Advanced ActionScript 3.0 Settings of Flash CS5?

Question

In Flash CS5, you can specify a Source path for the ActionScript settings so that the IDE can locate fully-qualified classes. For example, to have Flash IDE locate "flashObjects.Balloon" class I might have the following set in my Source path list:

/Users/michaelprescott/Projects/XYZ/Experiments/Tester/src/flashObjects

This works fine, but is NOT portable. I need a full path (not a relative one like ../../) that will work on other developer's machines including other OSX and Windows machines. Surely there is a way to specify the most common environment variables. I'm imagining something like:

$[USER_PROFILE_DIR]/Projects/XYZ/Experiments/Tester/src/flashObjects

Is this possible?

Answer 1

According to the web, the following are what you have to work with:

• $(AppConfig): Common/Configuration folder in the Flash install directory
  (/Applications/Adobe Flash CS5/Common/Configuration)
• $(LocAppConfig): en_US/Configuration folder in the Flash install directory in English (respective folders for other languages)
  (/Applications/Adobe Flash CS5/en_US/Configuration)
• $(UserConfig): Configuration folder in the current user's Local Settings directory
  (/Users/<user>/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS5/en_US/Configuration)
• $(LocalData): same as UserConfig
• $(FlexSDK): set by the user in preferences. May use other variables, and by default uses $(AppConfig)

Storing your objects in one of those spots would obviously work, but I bet that a symlink or two would make things even smoother.

Answer 2

Why not place your files in the directory above your working directory. That way you only need to reference them like this:

../files

Putting that in place let's it be fully portable from ANY computer. Instead of specifying from the 'root' folder, you can start from the current folder. I have confirmed this to work.

Important: If you want to use this method and want to place a directory INSIDE your current working directory, you'll have to refer to it as such:

./files

Because just setting files as the source path won't work. As far as I know, this feature (environment variables) has long been asked for from Adobe and never acted upon. This seems to be the general work around for the time being.