Flassari.is

After I updated Firefox past version 3.6.6 I started noticing some weird behavior when Flash Debug Player threw an error. Sometimes I would not be able to dismiss the error popup. Instead, it would freeze for almost a minute and then crash the flash plugin. It was nice that Firefox itself didn’t crash, but I found it quite irritating always having to kill the plugin-container.exe process to skip having to wait the 45 seconds every single time I visited a website with poorly written flash ads (majority of websites!).

Then I read nwebb’s blog post about a fix to this problem. To quote the blog post:

Since the official release of Flash Player 10.1 is out, now might be a good time to start implementing the global error handler.

When this is written, flash builder 4 doesn’t have a native way that lets you use it, so we have to do a little mix. (Update: The update is out.)
The global error handler works by adding an event to the uncaughtErrorEvents property of the loaderInfo of the application.
There are currently two methods of getting it to work.

Method 1 – The backwards compatible one:

Here the code doesn’t crash in flash player 9/10, but the error handling will only work in 10.1.

if(loaderInfo.hasOwnProperty("uncaughtErrorEvents")){
	IEventDispatcher(loaderInfo["uncaughtErrorEvents"]) .addEventListener("uncaughtError", uncaughtErrorHandler);
}

private function uncaughtErrorHandler(e:Event):void {
	trace("Global error:", e);
}

Method 2 – The type safe one:

Get the Flex 4.1 SDK if you haven’t already and choose that one as your project’s SDK.

Now you can use the new global error handling like it was meant to be used:

import flash.events.UncaughtErrorEvent;

loaderInfo.uncaughtErrorEvents.addEventListener( UncaughtErrorEvent.UNCAUGHT_ERROR, uncaughtErrorHandler);

private function uncaughtErrorHandler( e:UncaughtErrorEvent):void {
	trace("Global error:", e);
}