Accueil - Identifying a debug or release SWF file at runtime

It may be interesting to know at runtime whether an application is running from a debug or release SWF file. It allows the application to automatically execute debug specific code when the file is a debug SWF file and ignore this code when it is published as a release file.

I can't find any property that indicates whether an application is running from a debug or release SWF file in the Flash Player API reference while searching for it the other day. I hope this solution will help.

There's probably another way to achieve this, but I like this one because it can be written in one line only :

isDebug = new Error().getStackTrace().search(/:[0-9]+]$/m) > -1;

This code simply searches for line numbers of errors in StackTrace result. Only StackTrace result of a debug SWF file contains line numbers. Then we know that we are running a debug or release SWF file.

Note that usually, I prefer and encourage to manually create an Ant task that will build a release SWF file with no debug info at all into it. But when working on little projects, you haven't time to create such an Ant file nor specific debug classes or files. You can also use something like -define=CONFIG::DEBUG,true, but it's something easy to forget before publishing the file.

I've tested this solution when the SWF file containing the code is loaded by another SWF file. It continues to work correctly independently from the host application.

You can download an example that simply detects if the application is executed from a debug or release SWF file and write it on the screen.

You can also download download another example which shows it all works the same when the release and debug SWF files are loaded into another application.