One of the most common problems in developing new applications is their debugging. There are several methods to do this in Flex (trace, alert - like somebody once said: “Alert till death”). But what happens if you want the same logging that you had on your work environment to also be available when the application is distributed to the customer?

There are several methods to do this: logging into a field in the application, logging to the customer database (if the application uses a database) or using TraceTargets. There may be other methods to do this, but this are the main ones.

I will not talk about the database approach, but I will concentrate on the TraceTarget approach.

Imagine you have an application that is distributed to a lot of clients and one of them tells you he has a problem. In this case you can ask him for a description of the problem and try to replicate it. That often is not successful. What if you could instruct the application you developed to send you the trace information without having to write a lot of code?

… More to come in the next post. (Including some source code)