Google Analytics for Flex - Support for Flex 4.5

Sep 15, 2011

While trying to use Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash it turned out that it does not support Flex 4.5.

It throws the following exception:

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

       at global/flash.utils::getDefinitionByName()

       at com.google.analytics.components::FlexTracker()[/buRRRn/projects/GAforFlash/GA_AS3/build/tmp/com/google/analytics/components/FlexTracker.as:102]

Looking at the project's issue tracker, we found the unresolved bug (88) with this same exception.

Looking at the code, the solution was quite simple – The original FlexTracker was looking for the mx.core::Application class in order to get a reference to the Application instance:

 

 var appclass:Object = getDefinitionByName( "mx.core::Application" );
 _app = appclass.application;

 

Now, Flex 4.5 no longer uses this class of course; it is now using FlexGlobals.topLevelApplication for getting a reference to the Application instance.

Wrapping the code with a try/catch with supporting Flex 4.5 resulted with the following code which resolved the issue:

var appclass:Object;
try{//Flex 3
    	appclass = getDefinitionByName( "mx.core::Application" );
	_app = appclass.application;
}
catch (e:Error)
{//Flex 4.5
      appclass = getDefinitionByName( "mx.core::FlexGlobals" );
      _app = appclass.topLevelApplication;
}