On my workstation, where I do Flash development, I always run a debugger version of the Flash Player. This is because I do not use the Flash IDE nor Flex Builder for development and I still want to see trace output.
A side effect of having the debugger version of the Flash Player installed is that I also see trace output from any other website with Flash content that I visit when I have the trace console open. Sometimes this is quite funny because some programmers think its really cool to have swear words in their trace output. Most of the time however, I can’t seem to understand or make sense of their output or why its still there in the first place. Maybe I’m just anal, but I always seem to remove any trace statement I put in my code because that trace statement is there for debugging purposes only, not for general logging. Other then that, over the years I’ve adopted a specific syntax when it comes to trace output.
The main problem with trace statements is to be able to find them back in the code where they occurred. If you have a whole bunch of trace statements and your application is quite biggish, then five minutes after putting in the trace you’re probably still be able to remember where you placed it in your code. The next day however, you see a trace statement pop up but you have no clue where in your code the trace statement occurred. “Ah, then you just use the find function on your text editor”, you’d say. Valid point and sometimes this works. But what if your output is composed in the style of:
trace("varname=" + varname + ", somecounter=" + i );
Happy finding!
When I put trace statements in my code I usually include the class and method name in the trace statement. This way I can always quickly locate where in my code the trace statement occurred. My trace statements therefore look something like this:
trace("classname:methodname varname=" + varname + ", somecounter=" + i );
Now, whenever I see a trace statement popping up I know exactly where in my code this occurred and I can locate it in an instance.