Remote Debugging a swf on Android

So I recently had a very thorny challenge of debugging on android.

Because of business / technical reasons, we HAD to serve the swf via HTML through a specific server. The problem that I was having was that the at full screen the video went blank, although we could hear the audio.

Now just as some background, the project was inherited and while there was a decent MVC architecture in place, it was possible that any element on the screen had access to any other element and could modify its properties.... which happened quite a bit.

My challenge was to try to figure out how to get *some* information out of the device so I could have a clue as to what was going on.

I tried to reverse tether and proxy, but neither of those I could do without rooting, which I wasn't willing to do.

Then I tried setting up a hotspot from my laptop (http://www.connectify.me/) to see if I could get Charles in place to then do a local mapping which I could leverage for remote debugging in the IDE, but my version of Android didn't like ad-hoc networks.

Finally I discovered that Monster Debugger had a P2P version. This version allowed me to run demonster on my desktop and the app on the device and as long as they were on the same wifi network, I could get some telemetry. ROCK ON!

So I created a MonsterTraceTarget to go with my logging, and I got trace statements. I could also drill into the visual hierarchy and validate and set properties.

After much searching I found the video element about 16 levels deep with a width and height set to 0,0. This explains the audio but no video. Traces confirmed that somewhere in the code we were hitting the video api (not AS3, but a wrapper to the 3rd party video provider) and actually setting these crazy properties.

"Find Uses" (thank you IntelliJ), led me to half a dozen places where this could happen. More trace statements to determine which one was the culprit. Iterating on the "find uses" and trace statements, I finally discovered that it was an omission that had happened *months* earlier (so much for test early, test often), where there was a conditional test within the configuration startup for touch device and full screen (duh), where the stage rectangle was supposed to be calculated, but wasn't - hence the zeros.

Huge thanks to Demonster and IntelliJ for the tools needed to solve this 2-days-worth-of research thorny issue.