getDefinitionByName

That's a good point kglad, for classes that can be exported from the library - display related classes. I had forgotten about that.

you don't.

the class just needs to be compiled. class members in your library is the typical situation where instantiating instances via strings is useful.

Thanks, this is all good stuff. I will try using the multiple external swf approach but as I was only doing this to try and be clever I will probably end up just doing it manually :)

As an aside, can anyone explain how getDefinitionByName is useful if you have to manually reference the class name before using it?

Thanks again

See this post to find some explanation and classes that will help you to handle force classes import with flash:
http://www.ultrashock.com/forums/oop/as3-force-class-import-104606.html

As far as I'm aware, you don't have any choice in Flash.

If you have a way to create a SWF on the fly, Grant skinner wrote a class (FlashLib) to get the content of a SWF with loadBytes (so you have access to your classes).
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/03/using_flash_sym.html

If you don't compile with Flash but with the Flex SDK, you can:
- add each class in mxmlc parameter (not great).
and the solution I'm using:
- I create an Ant task that is creating first a SWC with compc, I include a folder (the package of all the classes that might be used with getDefinitionByName). And then, I compile my SWF with mxmlc including this SWC.

I hope it helps.

Romu
www.soundstep.com

I understand the dilemma.
But you need to reference a class in code in order to compile it, so unless I am mistaken there's no way around that - you need to force the class to be compiled into the swf somehow. I think I've read somewhere that you don't need to define a variable and you can just force inclusion like:

Class1;

I just tested it and it seems to work from the flash timeline.

I guess the other situation would be if you were loading classes from external swfs at runtime (in which case the classes would still need to be referenced in code for the external swfs that they were compiled into), and preloaded before you used the getDefinitionByName approach for instantiation. I've not tried that yet, and perhaps there's a bit more to it, but it would seem to be a good use-case for the type of approach you're taking.

You need to reference the classes somewhere to force them to be compiled in the swf.

so you can just try:

var forceClass1:Class1;

And it should work (without creating an instance).