AIR Tip 7 – Using Command Line Arguments
Posted by David Tucker in AIRJan 23rd, 2008 | 18 responsesAIR Tip 7: This tutorial will walk you through the process of using command line arguments with your AIR application. This tutorial is current for AIR Beta 3.
One of the useful ways that AIR applications is to interact with the operating system, is that is can receive command line arguments. These arguments are passed to the AIR application in the form of an InvokeEvent [ActionScript | JavaScript].
Receiving an InvokeEvent
To receive an InvokeEvent, you must add an event listener to the NativeApplication instance for your application. This can be defined in MXML or Actionscript for you Flex based AIR application, Actionscript for your Flash based AIR application, and JavaScript in your HTML / JavaScript based AIR application. All three methods are displayed in Code Example 1.
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<mx:WindowedApplication
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xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
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layout="vertical"
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invoke="onInvoke(event)">
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...
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</mx:WindowedApplication>
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NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(InvokeEvent.INVOKE, onInvoke);
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air.NativeApplication.nativeApplication.addEventListener(air.InvokeEvent.INVOKE, onInvoke);
Code Example 1 - Setting Up Your Application to Receive InvokeEvents
Handling the InvokeEvent
When you receive the InvokeEvent, the command line arguments will be passed in the property arguments as an array [ ActionScript | JavaScript ]. AIR does not distinguish between commands and arguments in the command line. If you need to include this capability, you will have to include it yourself.
Example
In today's example, you will build a sample AIR application that will respond to command line arguments. The example will be done in Flex Builder 3, but the techniques could easily be modified to work with Flash or HTML/JavaScript (if you have any specific implementation questions, please leave a comment).
Video (Click to View)
Other Uses for InvokeEvent
InvokeEvent is also used when an application is called to open a file by the operating system. The filename of the file is passed to the AIR application as an argument in an InvokeEvent. This is extremely important if you have registered your own filetype. When a user double-clicks on a file with your custom file type, the InvokeEvent will be dispatched. If you have not configured your application to listen for this event - your application will do nothing. I will cover custom file types in more detail in a future tutorial.
Application Code
Download (3 kb)
AIR Application (289 kb)
Reference
Developer Guide - Capturing Command Line Arguments (HTML / JavaScript)
Developer Guide - Capturing Command Line Arguments (Flex / ActionScript)
Developer Guide - Capturing Command Line Arguments (Flash)
18 Responses to “AIR Tip 7 – Using Command Line Arguments”
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About Me
David Tucker is a Rich Internet Application developer, author, and trainer. David currently serves as a Software Engineer at Universal Mind. In addition, David also blogs regularly at InsideRIA where he produces the Weekly RIA RoundUp podcast. David also recently completed the AIR 1.5 Cookbook (with a great group of co-authors) and the Lynda.com series, AIR for Flash Developers.
Sweet, just what I have been looking for. Well pleased…
hi David,
You seem to be an expert with AIR. Do you know how Single Sign On/ SSL Certificates could be used with Adobe AIR?
Thanks
Kiran
@Kiran – to use a Single Sign On system with an AIR application will require some server-side object to connect to. For example, if you have a ColdFusion CFC that can handle authentication – you can interact with that service via a Webservice or HTTPService call. (You can call a Webservice or HTTPService over HTTPS to handle this authentication). Does this answer your question?
Sweet resource. Will recommend…
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Hi David,
Great video. One thing I didn’t get though. Can you run your AIR application in batch? i.e. without having to first run the application. I just want to allow the option of using only the command line. Do you know what I mean?
@Swami – You can run your AIR application from the command line – and if you wanted – you could configure the application to exit once it has finished processing the arguments. I am not sure if this answers your question – so let me know if you need any more direction on this.
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Hi David,
Thanks for the post. Is there any possibility to excute a CLI command from AIR. I need to do a thing like this .
pdf2swf.exe input.pdf output.swf
I need to pass the path of the input.pdf and excute this command.
Also tell me Is there anyway available in AIR to convert set of PDF files to SWFs using Adobe AIR
Thanks in advance,
Sasi
Nice and to-the-point.
Any tips on running the resulting app from the command line?
I had trouble:
john-dimms-macbook-pro:Desktop jdimm$ /Applications/json2aso.app/Contents/MacOS/json2aso foo.json
2009-02-19 16:27:40.695 json2aso[6771:10b] NSDocumentController Info.plist warning: The values of CFBundleTypeRole entries must be ‘Editor’, ‘Viewer’, ‘None’, or ‘Shell’.
For some reason, moving the executable out of its install directory resolved that problem:
john-dimms-macbook-pro:Desktop jdimm$ cp /Applications/json2aso.app/Contents/MacOS/json2aso .
john-dimms-macbook-pro:Desktop jdimm$ ./json2aso foo.json
john-dimms-macbook-pro:Desktop jdimm$
Now I’m getting output. However, there is an annoying message that pops up and requires a click to dismiss:
Adobe AIR
This installation of this application is damaged. Try re-installing or contacting the publisher for assistance.
Any idea how to avoid that?
Also, I was getting the error described here:
I was getting the error mentioned here:
http://www.justria.com/2008/11/19/if-flexbuilder-complains-about-error-creating-air-file-305-error-10-solution/
“error creating AIR file: 305: ERROR, 10″
So I made this change to json2aso-app.xml:
The namespace in your example was 1.0.M6. That didn’t work for me.
Thanks again!
Пинайте своего хостера – сайт с трудом открылся
Hello David.
Actually i want to know, can we open commandprompt using air application and pass arugumets to them. Like opening cmd.exe and passing – (version) to it as argument.
@John Dimm
The error you’re getting happens with all AIR apps unless you use the proper invocation (the same you’d use for OS X apps : open) like this:
machine: ~user$ cd path to app bundle
machine: ~user$ open -a app_name
Question: how are you getting output? I would like to know if there’s anyway to print output as in to stdout? You know, like any standard command line tool?
Nice video, I am looking for solution similar to it.
Hi David,
I have question, my application has canvas, which allow user to put images anywhere inside it, and when user hit save button, it should pass row data of canvas to PHP, and then PHP will run AIR application over server, pass row data to it, so AIR application generate same canvas (place images at the location where user has placed) and save whole canvas as an image using ImageSnapshot.captureImage() and it has 300 dpi.
Is it possible and if yes then can you please guide me.
Thanks
Hi David,
Thanks for the post, great help.
I am trying to achieve SSO with AIR. I have some kind of SSO working with Flex app.
I am authenticating against AD with Kerberos based on SPNEGO. I have a CAS server setup on Tomcat and so the Cas login page shows up when I am authenticating for the first time.
But I want that my AIR client should not ask the user to authenticate if the user has already logged on to his/her machine authenticating against AD.
Any guidelines would be of great help.
Thanks in Advance.
Vandana
Yet another great developer that has abandoned his thread and left a lot of great questions unanswered.
Here’s a biggie (already asked and unanswered): Can you pass arguments TO the command line from within the AIR application?