Flash Article

Exploring the version 2 component architecture in Flash 8

Using View Components

Components that subclass the View class inherit methods that help manage child objects, including their creation, layout, and destruction. This distinction is useful—almost critical—when you build components that hold other components or objects, especially when they must adhere to a certain layout that constrains them or when you don't know until runtime what kinds of objects the container holds.

The View class makes it much easier to develop container components because component authors don't need to worry about writing the code that handles the management of child objects. It's built-in.

Window, Loader, Accordion, Alert, and Label are all view components.

Considerations When Subclassing View (mx.core.View)

Although each view subclass can define its own functionality through specific methods, there are important methods that every View subclass should implement by convention:

• addLayoutObject(): Call this when adding a subObject to a component that supports a layout. While not all View subclasses implement this method or have a layout strategy inherent in them, this method stub is useful in those cases.
• doLayout(): Call this by size() when the size of a View subclass changes. While it's not required for all Views to implement, it is recommended that Views implement this method for their layout code.

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