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Swfdec is a decoder/renderer for Macromedia Flash animations. The decoding and rendering engine is

This directory contains tests using the tracing functionality of Actionscript.

How does it work?

  ./trace [FILE1 [FILE2 [...]]]
The program trace in this directory takes all files on the command line or all
files in the current directory and runs them. Running consists of instancing a
SwfdecPlayer and iterating $FILE until 10 frames have passed. Everytime the 
trace function is invoked by that player, its output is appended to a buffer. 
Finally the captured output is compared to the file $FILE.trace. If the output 
matches, the test succeeded for the given file, otherwise it failed. In this 
case a diff is produced and dumped to stdout. The captured trace output is 
written to a file named "tmp". The return value is 0 if all tests passed, or 
failure if at least one test failed.


What are all the other files?

Some test files are created with Open Source tools. In that case, the sources 
used for creating them are included and named $FILE.$TOOL-EXTENSION. Every 
one of those files includes the command that were used for creating the test 
files. 


Why don't you autogenerate the SWF files from sources but include them?

An important thing to note is that this testsuite is supposed to test the 
correct handling of SWF files, so the reference file must be an SWF file. Since
Open Source tools could produce different SWF files depending on version, we
the testsuite could end up testing different files. This is something that is
definitely not wanted. Consider the source files annotations only.


How do I run my new test?

Create a file to test, say "test.swf", and put the expected output in the
corresponding trace file, in this case "test.swf.trace". After that, just call
the trace application with your file, like this:
  ./trace test.swf
You may need to build the trace application if you haven't run make check 
before, just run make trace.


How do I create a trace file?

The suggested method is to use a Flash authoring environment (like Flash Studio
or Flash MX), enable debugging and just copy the output this produces. 
Unfortunately this requires access to these tools, since they are expensive.


How do I add a test to the testsuite?

Just put the file, its trace file and if you have them, source files used for
creating the file into this directory and add all of them to EXTRA_DIST in 
Makefile.am. The file should appear in the output when running make check. 
(Note that the order of files tested during make check is pretty much random.)