How to Publish AIR 1.5 From Adobe Flash CS5 or CS5.5

Recently I've had to do some updates to a mission critical deployed set of kiosks that were built on AIR 1.5 using Flash CS4. The issue I ran into is that in Flash CS5 and CS5.5 there isn't any apparent way to publish back to AIR 1.5. After digging around a little bit I found this post on the Adobe forums that saved me.

You can modify the app-xml.xml AIR descriptor file that is created next to the published swf, to conform back to the AIR 1.5 descriptor file structure, then make the file read only. If you then create an AIR installer package from Flash CS and made the correct adjustments; you should end up with an AIR 1.5 installer package!



One of the main hangups I had is that the "versionNumber" tag in AIR 2.6 descriptors was just "version" back in the 1.5 format. Here is Adobe's detailed description of the AIR 1.5 descriptor. I came across some additional great documentation from Adobe that lists the structure of the descriptor files and changes that occurred in each version of AIR (Link at the bottom of the 2.7 reference).