This one has bugged me for ages (not in a real ranting type way, more in a WTF? way :p). The deal is if you have an ActionScript file open in Flex Builder and you use ALT+CMD+C* you get the old style ActionScript 1.0 / 2.0 style comment block (/* \*/). If you then try ALT+CMD+D you get what is affectionately referred to as “JavaDoc” style comments(/** */) It’s these comments that you add the @ parameters to which in turn are used when generating ASDoc documentation. Pretty cool so far…

However if you are in an MXML file and use an <mx:Script/> tag the ALT+CMD+D command inserts a <![CDATA[  ]]> tag instead. This I find rather frustrating. There are very few incidents where you’d need to insert an additional CDATA tag in a script block - beyond those automatically added as part of the tag, or if you were hard coding a massive block of text for some purpose of testing XML perhaps. Where is the consistency? I mean I’m using the same context, same perspective, different editor granted, but the code I am creating is exactly the same language inside the tags…

Come on guys please add a bit of common sense to the short cut keys. If you want to keep CDATA on ALT+CMD+D then why not use the JavaDoc short cut for the ASDoc comment short cut? ALT+CMD+J for those interested. It’s not a biggy, but I use the short cut keys quite a lot and in the middle of doing some commenting of an ItemRenderer I always seem to get caught out :p

\*All the short cuts are Mac ones as I don’t think there is any value in indicating both as it doesn’t add any further clarity to the post.

License

This work is published under a CC-GNU LGPL.