I'm trying componentize one of the pieces of UI in an AIR application that I'm developing in Flex. In this example, I want to display file information on a single line (which has an icon, some text/link and the size).
My code looks like this (component is called FileDisplay):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Canvas xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
<mx:Script>
<![CDATA[
public function set iconType(source:String):void {
this.ficon.source = source;
}
public function set fileName(name:String):void {
this.fname.htmlText = name;
}
public function set fileSize(size:String):void {
this.fsize.text = size;
}
]]>
</mx:Script>
<mx:Image id="ficon" />
<mx:Label id="fname" left="20" right="30" text="Filename" />
<mx:Label id="fsize" right="0" text="0 K" />
</mx:Canvas>
When I'm using this component in my main application, the actionscript looks like:
for each (var file:XML in result.files) {
var fd:FileDisplay = new FileDisplay();
fd.fileName = '<a href="blah">'+file.name+'</a>';
fd.iconType = getFileTypeIcon(file.name);
fd.fileSize = getFileSizeString(file.size);
this.file_list.addChild(fd);
}
However, when I do this, I get an error: Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method of a null object reference. This is because the child components of the FileDisplay are null (or at least they show up that way in the debugger).
Does anyone know if there's a way around this? Am I supposed to be waiting for events indicating the child components were created? Is there a more common pattern that solves this problem?
For now I can manually do everything in ActionScript in my main app (create a Canvas and add children to it) but I would appreciate any insight on how to separate the code more cleanly.