Struggling with Flex Error 1000: Ambiguous Reference to…

I recently faced a Flex Error 1000: Ambiguous Reference to that puzzled me, I thought I’d share what was the issue and how to workaround it.

This error was raised by the compiler when I attempted to use a property for which I had defined a public getter together with a protected setter.

Using public::myProperty or protected::myProperty fixed the problem!

The Flex Error 1000: Ambiguous Reference to was raised whether I accessed the getter or the setter method from any method of my class.

When using the property getter from outside the class, everything was fine, no compiler complaint. And, of course, when using the property setter, the expected Flex Error 1059: Property is read-only was correctly raised.

It took me some time to realize that the error was due to my setter being protected while my getter was public. My investigations made me discover that this was a bug raised on the Flex 2 compiler! This is bug number 174646 for which the description, as available on this Adobe Tech Note, is:

If a class contains accessor functions with different access control namespace attributes, (for example, a protected setter and a public getter) using one of them causes a compile-time-error, for example,Compiler-Error 1000: Ambiguous reference to myVar
The workaround is to rename your getter or setter function to avoid the mismatch.

It seems that this bug is still not fixed in Flex 3! What about Flex 4 that I’m not (yet) using? Do you know if it’s still there?

Anyway, the easiest way to workaround this issue is, for me, not really to rename your getter or setter but to call them using a fully qualified namespace.

For you public getter, instead of writing:

var myVar:* = myProperty;

use:

var myVar:* = public::myProperty;

For using your protected setter, replace the usual:

myProperty = value;

by:

protected::myProperty = value;

No more nasty Flex Error 1000: Ambiguous Reference to while keeping my getters and setters as expected!