Sprite scaling children even though stage.scaleMode = "noScale" and stage.align = "TL"

Question

I am creating an AIR nativeWindow. I am adding two children, an HTMLLoader and a Sprite. The child Sprite has two children, a TextField and a Sprite that will be used to draw. I have set stage.scaleMode = "noScale" and stage.align = "TL", which the HTMLLoader seems to respect. However, the child Sprite scales its children whenever I set a height.

public function BaseWindow(){
 var winInit:NativeWindowInitOptions = new NativeWindowInitOptions();
 winInit.type = NativeWindowType.NORMAL;
 winInit.resizable = false;
 winInit.maximizable = false;
 super(winInit);

 //native window
 activate();
 alwaysInFront = true;
 addEventListener(Event.CLOSING, onClosing, false, 0, true);
 stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;
 stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
 width = DEFAULT_WIDTH;
 height = DEFAULT_HEIGHT;

 //html loader
 _html = new HTMLLoader();
 stage.addChild(_html);  
 _html.width = DEFAULT_WIDTH;
 _html.height = DEFAULT_HEIGHT;
 _html.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onComplete, false, 0, true);
 _html.addEventListener(Event.LOCATION_CHANGE, onLocationChange, false, 0, true);   

 //distractor
 distractor = new Distractor();
 stage.addChild(distractor);
 distractor.height = 30;   

 urlVars = new URLVariables();
 req = new URLRequest();
 req.data = urlVars;
}

How do I prevent the distractor Sprite from scaling its children?

Answer 1

all children of a Sprite are scaled with the parent, the only way of doing this is to work out the scale factor then apply the inverse of it to all children (see "applications" section of this article for an example), but then the simplest idea is probably to make the thing you want to scale (presumably a background) a sibling of the text field rather than a parent then scale it separately.