Cairngorm 2 Plugin

The Cairngorm Plugin is an Eclipse plugin that augments Flex Builder to provide tooling that improves productivity when developing Cairngorm-based RIAs.

The initial focus of the Cairngorm Plugin is on the Controller. It aims to improve productivity by removing the repetitive action of creating a new Command and associated Event and adding them to the Controller.
It provides a new class wizard for the following Cairngorm artifacts:

• ** Controller ** - creates a new Controller
• ** Command ** - creates a new Event and a new Command and adds them to the Controller.

The class templates used for the codegen are externalized and distributed with Cairngorm. This allows you to modify the templates to support your own code style.

To learn how to use the Cairngorm Plugin please see the Plugin Documentation.

System Requirements

The Cairngorm Plugin has been developed for Flex Builder 3. Please refer to the Flex Builder 3 system requirements. Alternativley, a Flex 4 Patch can be found here.

Installation

** Eclipse and Flex Builder **

To install the Cairngorm Plugin you will need to have Eclipse and Flex Builder installed.

Firstly, you must install Eclipse. We recommend the ** Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers ** package, which can be downloaded from here.
After you have Eclipse installed you must install the Flex Builder plugins, which can be downloaded from here.

If you are new to Eclipse and want to learn more please see the Eclipse " Getting Started" resources.

(Note: the plugin has not been tested with FB standalone, if you want to use the standalone edition of FB please refer to the bottom of this thread .)

** Cairngorm Plugin **

The Cairngorm Plugin is installed from an Eclipse update site:

• Within Eclipse go to Help > Software Updates > Find and Install...
• Choose Search for new features to install and click Next.
• Create a New Remote Site...
• Enter a Name (e.g. Cairngorm) and the following URL: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/opensource/cairngorm/plugin/
• Follow the installation wizard.

** Cairngorm **

• Download cairngorm2_2_2beta-bin.zip .
• Extract the 'cairngorm2_2_2beta-bin.zip' on your local machine to a folder of your choice.

This is a ** beta ** release to enable use of the Cairngorm Plugin. The SWC has been compiled with Flex 3, which required code changes that we have not yet focused on making backward compatible with Flex 2. It also contains a number of bug fixes (see the release notes for details). We can not guarantee that the final release of 2.2.2 will contain these bug fixes and we may decide to support backward compatibility with Flex 2. These decisions will not be made until the Cairngorm Committee has consulted with the community. At this time we do not recommend that you use this SWC in your projects. You can safely use the Cairngorm Plugin with the Cairngorm 2.2.1 SWC, which can be downloaded from here , it only requires the 2.2.2Codegen-beta distribution for the codegen templates that are packaged with Cairngorm.

Known Issues

** The Cairngorm Plugin can't find existing Controllers **
If you create a Controller using the plugin it gives it a unique ID. It does this using a class variable:

• private static const UUID : String = "1422eaac-9ba3-4328-b44d-597f464fa5bb";

The unique ID is used internally by the plugin to associate the Controller with its configuration, which is managed under the project properties.
If a Controller doesn't have the above variable the plugin will ignore it. If you have an existing Controller you will need to add the above variable manually, but make sure the value is unique.

** Custom code in the Controller **

When you add a new Command it is automatically added to the controller, to enable this the plugin uses the Flex Builder Code Model API to re-write the Controller with the new Command added. There are some limitations as the Plugin will ignore the following:

• code style
• the use of implements
• metadata
• function code block - if you need a custom function put it in base class

** Cairngorm Controller and Cairngorm Command not appearing in pop-up menu **

The option to add a new 'Cairngorm Controller' and add a new 'Cairngorm Command' should appear in the pop-up menu under 'New', as shown in the following screen shot.

In some instances they are not appearing, to-date this has only been observed in Eclipse Europa. It appears to be a bug in Eclipse and the only workaround is to create a new workspace.

Bugs and Enhancements

Bugs and enhancements can be logged under the Cairngorm project on bugs.adobe.com.

The Cairngorm Plugin is a component of the Cairngorm project. You will need to create a new issue against Cairngorm and select ** FlexBuilder Plugin ** from the list of components.

Forum

To discuss further development of the Cairngorm Plugin please use this forum .