I’ve written several articles about Flash Builder 4.5’s code templates feature. However, I got a question by email today that made me realize another aspect of templates that’s potentially confusing.
Specifically, I was asked about the “Flash Builder” template category, and how to access those templates (since they don’t show up in the code hint list).
![](/resources/2011/06/27/flash_builder_templates.png)
Unlike the other template types (ActionScript, MXML, and CSS), the Flash Builder templates aren’t templates you invoke directly via the code hint list. Instead, those templates give you a way to customize the code that Flash Builder generates when it creates methods, event handlers, and properties. Flash Builder uses these templates when you use Quick Assist to create a method or event handler, when you use the Generate Getter/Setter command (either from Quick Assist or from the menu), when you use the Override/Implement Methods menu item, or when you create a method override using the override code hint.
For example, by default several of these items have a comment in them that looks something like this:
// TODO Auto-generated method stub
I tolerated this for a while, but last week while preparing my Flash Builder coding productivity presentation I decided I was finally tired of deleting those comments every time, so I edited those templates to remove the comment.