AS3 quick and efficient way of removing children and listeners and discarding the parent

Question

Is there a fast and efficient way of removing all children listeners etc from my app. If everything is contained in a display object on the stage called View? I have lots of dynamically called children and their listeners do not get removed when I remove the View they reside in.

    public function _discard ():void
    {
        // Quick way to discard the view, remove children and listeners
        removeChild(View);
        View = null;
    }

Is this a valid way of removing the parent and children?

Answer 1

AFAIK, there is no way to enumerate listeners in ActionScript. So you have to write cleanup code, removeEventListener calls symmetrical to addEventListener.

Answer 2

alxx is right. there is no easy trick to solve this problem. In order to avoid removing manually all children/listeners, I would create a helper method that receives a View and recursively removes all children and their respective listeners.

Answer 3

If you use weakly referenced listeners then the listeners will not prevent the objects from being garbage collected when you nullify them.

useWeakReference is the 5th parameter in the addEventListener call.