Question

When debugging some container sizes (namely, HBox) in Flex (v. 3.5), I noticed a variable “$height” in the Variables list.

Does anyone know what this variable is? It’s marked as protected, but I don’t believe I can access it in a child class.

I’ve noticed it sometimes gets a different value than “height” and “_height”. Does anyone know why this is and what it means for how a component is drawn?

Answer 1

The full mx framework source is available in your sdk directory here:

\..\sdks\3.3.0\frameworks\projects\framework\src

The private documentation says.

 /*
 *  This property allows access to the Player's native implementation
 *  of the 'height' property, which can be useful since components
 *  can override 'height' and thereby hide the native implementation.
 *  Note that this "base property" is final and cannot be overridden,
 *  so you can count on it to reflect what is happening at the player level.
 */

It’s marked with mx_internal so you need to declare use namespace mx_internal; to get access to it in your own class.