Flex/AS3 Eclipse Formatter

Okay, this made me all excited on a very deep geek level. During 360Flex someone told me about this and I almost immediately downloaded it, I say almost to be honest – still had to finish the conference.

This code formatter is available on sourceforge.net and free to download. You can get it here.

The setup is easy and provided by the author:

Download Instructions
Please read the release notes: https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=248408&release_id=680576. Download the jar and put it in your ‘dropins’ directory and restart (Eclipse 3.4) or in your ‘plugins’ directory and restart with the -clean argument (Eclipse 3.3). Or use the following update site (make sure you have internet proxy settings established if necessary): http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite

As soon as the formatter was installed I went to Window > Preferences and then did a quick filter for “Flex” to find the Flex Formatting. The following screen shots are my selections, but what is best about the tool is also the visual editor showing you how the changes you make directly affect the code. Extremely helpful and a must have eclipse plugin.

And the final export properties file.
Flex Formatting File

To activate your preferred settings just press: ctrl+shift+F (win)

Geek happiness is well formatted code.