Updating the Flex 3 SDK with Charting

Today I realized that I had been compling my Flex applications with an old version of the Flex SDK.  I was using 3.0.0 while the latest version is 3.4.0, so I decided to update it by downloading the latest version from the Adobe Open Source website.

I put the files in a new folder under the “sdks” directory as directed.

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3 Plug-in\sdks

Then I told Eclipse (Flex Builder) about the new SDK and configured it to be the default SDK.  So far so good.

I attempted to build my current project with the new SDK and received all kinds of charting errors.  The errors essentially said that this and that type of chart didn’t exist.  So after a long while of Google searching I finally came upon the answer in the comments of some blog.

This is what you need to do:

If your application uses Flex Builder Professional features such as data visualization components or automated testing, you will need to copy those elements from the latest milestone SDK that came with Flex Builder into your newly downloaded SDK. The relevant files that you need to copy are:
{sdkdir}/frameworks/libs/automation*.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/libs/datavisualization.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/locale/en_US/automation*.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/locale/en_US/datavisualization_rb.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/locale/ja_JP/automation*.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/locale/ja_JP/datavisualization_rb.swc
{sdkdir}/frameworks/rsls/datavisualization_3.0.0.477.* (or updated build numbers for later builds)
{sdkdir}/fbpro (if you care about source)

After copying these files, close Eclipse and then re-start it.  You should be ready to go now.