How can I manipulate shapes in Adobe Flex?

Question

I'm working on an application where I'm drawing some rectangles on the screen, and then will need to manipulate the shapes (change their size, location). I tried to do something with .drawRect and clearing the shape each time I was manipulating it, but the RAM usage was spiking and then falling (presumeably because i keep reinitializing a new component and then removing it, and garbage collection was cleaning it out). This seems like its probably not the most efficient way to do it.

Is there a way for me to just create a shape once, and then move it around on a canvas (and change its width and height without all this RAM usage?

Answer 1

If all you're doing is changing it's offsets, and adjusting it's width and height without needing to fundamentally change the structure of the shape (such as rounding the corners of a rectangle of some such) you should be able to just maintain a reference to the Shape and adjust it's x, y, scaleX, scaleY properties to effect the changes.

http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/display/DisplayObject.html#scaleX

Answer 2

You can try Degrafa to draw the rectangle.

To move the rectangle:

• Changing the x and y or height and width property of the shape
• Using the Flex Move Effect