charles newman's blog

I was trying to instantiate a class using the class name as a string, like this:

var pluginInfoRef:Class = getDefinitionByName(“com.foo.bar.MyClassName”) as Class;

But kept getting this error:

ReferenceError: Error #1065: Variable MyClassName is not defined.

Which really has nothing to do with the problem since “MyClassName” is not a variable.  I think the problem here is the SWF compiler in Flex Builder is optimizing out any imports that don’t get instantiated, so at run-time, the class really doesn’t exist in the SWF. The work around I came up with is to add this line:

private static const forceReference:MyClassName = null;

This causes the SWF compiler to pull the class into the SWF and getDefinitionByName started to work.  Now, I’d like to have that 20 minutes back.

Charles Newman Adobe Flex