After finding out that the stateful skinning approach was hitting the CPU pretty hard we had to go back and revise some skin/styling themes. This is can be a very time consuming process pending on the size of your theme and application.
Kevin Skrenes, a coworker and friend of mine who is a Senior Developer here at EffectiveUI, help smooth out the process for the conversion by writing a couple JSFL scripts for Flash. I really want to point out that Kevin Skrenes deserves A LOT of credit for this, but he doesn’t have a site or blog to publicize about it himself.
There are 3 scripts:
1) Create Stateless Symbols.jsfl
2) Remove Linkage Class Names.jsfl
3) Select Stateful Symbols.jsfl
Download the scripts here:
http://patrickhansen.com/resources/flash/StatefulToStatelessScripts_v1-0.zip
Install them in:
user/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash/en/Configuration/Commands
* this is on a Mac, not 100% sure what it is on Windows.
Make sure to quit Flash before installing.
Open Flash and you should see these commands under the Commands menu.
To convert:
Select the symbol(s) from the library you want to convert and use Create Stateless Symbols.
Linkage Class correction
Now, you may have some issues with the linkage Class. You should probably run this secondary script just in case to ensure you correct the linkage Class and ID to optimize it for stateless.
Removing old symbols
There is also a script to select any stateful symbols in the library, so you can delete them.
So, if you have some old legacy skins that are holding down your performance, go ahead and use these scripts to convert them, and hopefully save some time. 🙂
CSS
Remember, you will also have to correct your CSS for the new stateless skins.
Notes:
This is in its first round and there may be some issues with these scripts, so please let me know if you come across any.
Also, everything is not fully automated, so you may have to do some things manually.
It is possible to consolidate all of this into a single script, but we left them separate for our unique circumstances and scenarios.
Why use stateless when you can fix stateful?
http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+Component+Kit+for+Flash?focusedCommentId=29753817#comment-29753817
http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-20228
Guillaume Malarte
Thank you for this comment. I have not been tracking this bug thread.
This appears to be the fix that Adobe provided us (effectiveUI), and we implemented it into a test, and, although this fix did improve the performance, it did not completely solve the issue. On our end, it seemed to reduce the CPU hit by about 50-70%, but did not put the CPU performance back to the equivalent of using no external skins or stateless skins.
Some of the developers I have been working with on this are looking deeper into this issue.