FDT5 Problem Solved – ‘application descriptor not found’ – compiling mobile project on desktop

By | November 28, 2011
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I really like working in FDT5 and was eager to try out mobile app development. The first test I did I had no problem, then all of a sudden, any new app was not launching, giving the error:

application descriptor not found

I thought it was a machine-to-machine problem, i.e., working on my desktop and not on my laptop, then I found I had an app on my desktop that would run but not a new project. Hmm. It looked like the arguments to the adl call was not handled properly. In the correctly working version, the output was:

adl.exe
-nodebug
-profile
mobileDevice
-screensize
480×816:480×854
C:\Users\Jonathan\workspace\workingapp\bin/workingapp-app.xml
C:\Users\Jonathan\workspace\workingapp\bin

but in the non-working (new) app, the output was:

adl.exe
-nodebug
-profile
mobileDevice
-screensize
480×816:480×854
C:\Users\Jonathan\workspace\trycompile
C:\Users\Jonathan\workspace\trycompile\bin

so it seemed an adl argument issue. This was not immediately obvious to me, even reaching this point took a couple of hours. I had also found this recent FDT bug report on JIRA.

Solution

I started mucking around with compiler settings, and eventually tracked it down into the .settings > launch folder, for my app called “trycompile”, the file .settings > launch > trycompile.launch. In the working version, FDT had inserted the line:

<stringAttribute key="ADL_DESCRIPTOR_FILE" value="bin/workingapp-app.xml"/>

but this was absent in the non-working file. So I added the following line to that file:

<stringAttribute key="ADL_DESCRIPTOR_FILE" value="bin/trycompile-app.xml"/>

When I added that line, the project worked (both desktop and laptop). Yay for me!

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