Accessing components created thru AS addChild

Question

I am working on an application that requires me to add
componts on the fly, based on the field type as entered into the
database. (code attached).
So, I have no idea how many componets will be added, or what
types they will be.
On click of a save button, I need to be able to access the
values typed in to the boxes. Normall its textbox.text, but since I
don't know the names of the boxes, I'm stumped.
I have tried adding the name of the component to an array
just before I use the .addChild() in the switch statments, but that
only gives me an array of the names, and looping through the array,
using array(i).text gives me an error.
Any ideas? I'm stuck on this. Maybe there is a better way of
adding the boxes to the page than what I'm doing.
Thanks!

Answer 1

I strongly urge you to consider using mx:Repeater. It does a
lot of work for you , including creating arrays of references to
repeated components. If you give some tag in the repeater an id,
say mytext", then you can access the instances of that component
using mytext[n].text, where "n" is the index of the dataProvider
item.
Doing this below does NOT create an id you can use to
reference the component instance:
myEditor.id = "Answer"+i.toString();
If you want to stick with manual addChild, you will need to
keep a reference to the created components yourself. One effective
way is to use an associative array, like a hash table. This is just
a dynamic "Object".
private var _myEditors:Object = new Object();
myEditor = new RichTextEditor();
myEditor.text = "Answer question here";
_myEditors["Answer"+i] = myEditor; //toString is not
necessary here
vbLabBk.addChild(myEditor);
Then you can later access those instances like this:
var myEditor:RichTextEditor = _myEditors["Answer"+i];
But consider Repeater. It does this and much more for you,
such as destroying unwanted child components when the data changes.
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