Question

By “refresh” I am completely disposing it and then introducing it again in the application (without closing the application itself – that is). Other than than I think the question is self-explanatory.

Example:
Say I have a component named myComponent. I add that component to the application using MXMl in the standard way <components:myComponent id="myID" />. Say that when a user clicks a button (the button may be in another state), the component with id myID should be garbage-collected and a new instance of it added to the application.

How do I go about doing that? If there are multiple solutions which one is the optimal performance-wise?

I am new to Flash and Flex so excuse me if any incorrect terminology were used.

Answer 1

Remove all the event listeners from the old component; whatever they are using the removeEventListener method:

myButton.removeEventListener(someEvent, someEventHandlerMethod);

Then all variables that refer to the component should be set to null. If created in an MXML file, like this:

<s:Button id="myButton" />

Then all you have to do is set that value to null:

myButton = null;

Once there are no references to the component, it can safely become eligible for garbage collection.

If you want to re-created, then just re-created it. You’ll have to re-create it in ActionScript, but the code isn’t hard. Conceptually something like this:

myButton = new myButton();
myButton.properties = propertyValues;
myButton.addEventListener(someEvent, someEventHandlerMethod);
parentContainer.addChildAt(myButton, whateverPositionYouWantToADdTheComponentAt);

I’m not sure I see the benefit of doing this. I suspect it’ll be much more efficient to tweak the existing button instance in the way you need to as opposed to destroying it and trying to replace it with the exact same thing.