Flash CS5's Nasty Bug :: Flash Can Not Parse This Document

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Flash CS5's Nasty Bug :: Flash Can Not Parse This Document

06/14/10

Flash CS5's Nasty Bug :: Flash Can Not Parse This Document

05:01:55 pm, Categories: Software, Adobe, Rants , Tags: adobe, beta test, cs4, cs5, flash, flash can not parse this document, flash cs5 bug

Flash CS5 bug Imagine you just dropped $599 on the CS5 upgrade, and you cannot wait to try out the new Adobe software. You have a bunch of things you were working on in Flash CS4, but CS5 is new and you want to start using it right away. You load up your old files, work on them for, oh, 24 or 30 hours, all the while saving as CS5 format. You are done for the week, enjoy your weekend, open up Flash CS5 on Monday to continue working and you get this message.

"Cannot open .fla file. Flash can not parse this document."

Wait...really?

You try again, because you know you saved the file. Religiously.

"Cannot open .fla file. Flash can not parse this document."

Yes friends, our new buddy Flash CS5 feels like a beta. This is a known bug. This is happening to me. Right now. I am not happy.

Also, I discovered that the radio button component works differently in CS4 and CS5. I don't know how, but when I program my multiple choice questions and all works in CS5, I get funky errors in CS4. Re-open in CS5 (without changing a single line of AS) and it works fine. I have no other details, because I've had bigger fish to fry with Flash today.

Luckily, in my scenario above, I was testing enough in CS4 and CS5 to save 70% of my work. Here is my workaround:

1) Open your CS4 file in CS5.
2) Work on it, but click Save As CS4 file when you are done.
3) Continue to use Flash CS5 in this lame way until Adobe fixes it

Yes friends, you are saving your CS4 files as CS4 files to work on them with flash. I haven't had any issues with files created in CS5 originally, so if you are working in CS5, don't downgrade to CS4 and then back up because you will encounter this bug. Now I have a new problem...my client hasn't upgraded to CS5...when they do, they will have the same problems unless Adobe gets this fixed fast.

While researching a solution to this mess, I discovered that there is a new Flash patch 11.0.1. Yay! However, it did nothing to fix my current files. Boo!

Maybe this is what I get for being an early adopter. However, I feel like Adobe blew it again with 1) No public Beta and 2) Pushing out CS upgrades before they are ready. How hard must it be to get 7+ products updated and released all at the same time? It's got to be near impossible but yet they cram them all out at the same time anyway. CS3 and CS4 felt that way, and now CS5 is the same. I feel like I am beta testing for Adobe, and I am paying them for the privilege.

I love Adobe products...six months after they are released when all the bugs are fixed. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on Adobe. I won't get suckered into a release day upgrade again.

6/15/10: UPDATE: A very nice Adobe rep who saw this post (or my FB post, or maybe it was my Twitter post...) contacted me and offered to figure out what was going on with my file. Today, I got the file back and it seems to work fine. There was an empty frame on layer 1 of one of the symbols in my library. I sent a note back requesting more information about how to prevent it from happening again, how to fix it when it happens etc, and am waiting for a response. So far, its pretty impressive that Adobe is taking such an active role in squashing this bug. I'm downgrading from angry to annoyed.

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19 comments

Comment from: Angela Roberts [Visitor]

I think I need to write a nasty blog about this same issue because I just lost days of work because of this problem. I have done every suggestion that I could find online and none of them are fixing it. I even contacted Adobe with no response. An SNAP!!!

Any suggestions for me?

06/19/10 @ 22:48

Comment from: Thomas Toth [Member]

They reached out to me...blog about it, complain on the forums...there doesn't seem to be a fix.

The Adobe person told me they used a "special tool" to examine my symbols. Apparently, my library contained a symbol with no frames on layer 1. That seems to be the magic kill pill. However, he wasn't able to let me into the secret. Contact Adobe tech support, fill out an online support request, send them your broken .fla. They were able to return mine all fixed up. Hopefully, they can do the same for you.

06/21/10 @ 01:18

Comment from: MR.JOE [Visitor]

· http://www.mindless-studios.net

Thanks to "wbfreek21" from the Flash Forums, he's found a solution that's worked (copy and pasted below). To speed through the process, cut each directory one by one (Buttons, Movieclip, Graphic, etc) until the fla opens, that way you at least know what type of symbol has caused the error. HERE IS HIS SOLUTION:

I was able to solve this problem for a corrupted .fla file. Here's what I did to solve it:

1 - change the extension of the fla to zip so you can unzip the fla into its folder structure (flv).
2 - within the LIBRARY folder, there is likely some asset that is causing the problem. you must figure out which one (or more) it is. you can do this by simply removing files from that folder until your file opens successfully (open the flv file in the root).
3 - once you have the xml files that are causing the problem, you can actually fix them by going in and removing the empty frames. in mine, the part of the xml i removed looked like this:

[DOMLayer name="Layer 2" color="#9933CC" current="true" isSelected="true"]
[frames/]
[/DOMLayer]
[DOMLayer name="Layer 4" color="#FF4FFF"]
[frames]
[DOMFrame index="0" keyMode="9728"]
[elements/]
[/DOMFrame]
[/frames]
[/DOMLayer]
[DOMLayer name="Layer 3" color="#FF800A"]
[frames]
[DOMFrame index="0" keyMode="9728"]
[elements/]
[/DOMFrame]
[/frames]
[/DOMLayer]

Basically look for any [frames] tags that don't have anything in them. These are harmless to remove as they are not adding anything to your file anyway.

Now you can open the .flv and save it as a .fla again if you wish.

This seems like a trivial thing for Adobe to be able to fix. If it can't handle empty frames from CS4, then it shouldn't create them in the first place.

Hope this helps someone. . .

06/22/10 @ 13:57

Comment from: brooks [Visitor]

MR.JOE you helped a ton, thanks. My file is not fixed completely but I was able to dig through a bunch of the components and narrowed it down to some shared flash components as the perps.

06/23/10 @ 13:24

Comment from: William [Visitor] · http://ultramod.net

Just going back to the Steve Jobs comment on html5, and CSS3, thing. Open Source language is free. AND, html is html. So whether 4.0, xhtml 1.0, strict or transitional, it always works (give the coder knows what he or she is doing). Oh so you say you want cool effects without html5 because its not cross browser compatible, answer is Javascript/jquery. I am out before pro flash people lynch me.

07/14/10 @ 20:10

Comment from: Kelly White [Visitor] · http://www.touchwoodcreative.com

You have no idea how much time this just saved me... I had 1 movie clip with a blank layer. Removed that and days of work saved. THANK YOU VERY MUCH! P.S. to the douche bag with the Apple hit&run... I can show you some real Flash/Flex development that HTML5 can't even touch. Gimmie a break...

07/29/10 @ 17:18

Comment from: Jon [Visitor] · http://www.phase3it.com

Excellent! I have at least a week invested in this project, and this saved me. What’s weird about my situation : I have 18 incremental saves, AND I restored multiple copies from backup (I had thought corruption occurred when copying data across RDP connections) – for some reason CS5 decided ALL of them were corrupt. The offending symbol isn’t even in some of the earlier versions I attempted to open. Go figure!

I knew I should have stuck with MX!

Note : I used notepad ++ to search within the files. Windows 7 search is broken (yayyy MS)

Thanks again MR.Joe

I also referenced :

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/638346

and

http://blog.jasperstocker.com/?p=150&cpage=1#comment-12

08/04/10 @ 09:42

Comment from: ciri [Visitor]

· http://ciri.be

I came accross this nasty bug today! I have found a better solution than manually editing the files though. Use winrar to fix the file cfr http://ciri.be/blog/?p=259. Hopefully this'll work for you guys too.

08/06/10 @ 12:06

Comment from: Barrett [Visitor] · http://www.sosuke.com

I was able to find out that there is actually an ETX character in that empty node that might be causing this issue, I did a write up on it complete with wbfreek26 as the source of the solution! http://www.sosuke.com/index.php/2010/08/11/flash-cannot-parse-this-doc ument-adobe-flash-cs5/

08/11/10 @ 13:05

Comment from: Filippo Gregoretti [Visitor] · http://www.pippoflash.com

Thanks for the post.
I have managed to recover my corrupt fla file.
I have posted the solution here:
http://www.pippoflash.com/index.php/2010/08/18/flash-cs5-fla-file-corrupt-solution-to-flash-can-not-parse-this-document/

love,
Filippo

08/18/10 @ 10:20

Comment from: Leo Brown [Visitor] · http://www.flvvideodownloader.com/

Just got CS5 and this problem got me scratching my head for some time. Thanks MR.JOE for sharing "wbfreek21's" solution.

10/15/10 @ 04:22

Comment from: asmithstudio [Visitor]

· http://asmithstudio.com

Thanks MR.JOE for the zipped folder solution. Though I didn't take the time to pinpoint the xml causing the trouble, I was able to re-open the fla by following the process you outline. Thanks!

10/28/10 @ 11:12

Comment from: Al [Visitor]

Does anyone know if Adobe have said they'll fix this at any particular date?

10/31/10 @ 23:18

Comment from: JJones [Visitor]

I had this same issue with cs5 as I was creating an action scripting e-learning module. I would create the document and save it and when I would reopen it I would get the error that flash could not open the parse document. Turns out my error with this was that I was copying text from a PDF and pasting it into text boxes within my flash piece. By trouble shooting I figured it out and that seemed to correct my problems by just simply taking the time to type out all the text for the document.

Hope this helps someone else because I think I lost a bit on the hair line from trouble shooting this.

12/09/10 @ 12:54

Comment from: Brandt [Visitor]

We ran into this problem as well. Unzipped the project in component folders and deleted everything from LIBRARY and other folders. Did not help. Found this solution:

http://www.sosuke.com/index.php/2010/08/11/flash-cannot-parse-this-document-adobe-flash-cs5/comment-page-1/#comment-992

One of the XML files in the root directory had a strange/hidden character in it. Used Firefox to open the file and complain about a bad character. Then used a text editor to remove the character. Whew!!

Hope this helps someone out there.

12/11/10 @ 21:17

Comment from: mark [Visitor]

· http://eclecticanima.com

all these suggestions sounded great and i even got the parsing errors when i check the XML files in Firefox. the problem with mine is in the main DOMDocument.xml file, over half of the code is missing. i compared the corrupt XML with a working version and the corrupt one stops at line 457 and the working XML file contains over 17,000 lines of code. so when my file died it took 99% of the code with it. coincidentally, about the same amount of library items are missing from the LIBRARY folder. so forget about looking for empty frames when there are no symbol XML files to even look at. luckily(?) i had been exporting my scenes along the way and was able to recover what i lost using Sothink SWF decompiler.

12/31/10 @ 11:57

Comment from: Mario Borg [Visitor] · http://www.marioborg.com

CS5 sucks big time, After working for 20/30 minutes it becomes unresponsive, and if you try to save you might loose data. Adobe we want our money back!!

03/24/11 @ 04:36

Comment from: BWT [Visitor] · http://www.beginnerwebsitetutorial.com

Thank you so much for this. I encountered the same problem.

06/25/11 @ 13:16

Comment from: ashutosh [Visitor]

Dear Joe

Thanks a lot for your advise! It has saved a lot of time due to your solution. God bless you!

09/28/11 @ 08:42

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