Flex 2 SDK / mxml

Question

I've been programming a fairly complex Flash app for a while
now. It began as a Flash 8 app. I am more of a programmer than a
designer, so my program was pretty much implemented in *.as files
even in Flash 8. I've been porting the application to Flex 2
SDK/Flash 9/ActionScript 3 (which suits my workflow fantastically
since I tend to do everything in code) and I'm 99% done and really
happy with the results... The only issue I'm running into is this
one:
When porting my app to Flex 2 SDK, I opted to just make a
class called Player which subclasses flash.display.Sprite and then
I would pass Player.as into the mxmlc compiler directly, avoiding
the use of any MXML at all. Player acts as my top level
displayobjectcontainer under the Stage. This works great, except
the last class I need to port over for my current application uses
an mx.control.TextArea. I tried to just "new" one and then addChild
it to the parent, and while that doesn't cause any compilation
errors or runtime exceptions or anything, the TextArea never
displays. I did some research and it seems like the only reasonable
way to add a TextArea is to define it in MXML, which means that I
now need an MXML for my project. There are loads of example MXMLs
to be found all over the place, but all the ones I find tend to be
way more complicated that I want or need. My basic question is,
what is the easiest way to take what I have and get it working with
an MXML shell with the least amount of changes to my app, which
works great as-is (other than the fact that I can't use mx controls
without an MXML).
I tried the obvious solution, making a simple MXML that
references my Player class (which I changed to subclass
UIComponent) and a TextArea:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application width="400" height="400" xmlns:mx="
http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
xmlns="*">
<Player id="player"/>
<mx:TextArea id="titleArea" width="10" height="10"
text=""/>
</mx:Application>
This kind of works the way I would expect, except the 'stage'
member of Player is null -- why is this? How can I get a reference
to the global stage if my top level UIComponent class' 'stage'
member is null? Why is it null? It isn't null when I mxmlc the
Player.as file directly. Since I do a lot of my button/other
control resizing based on stage height and since I want to grab the
stage's loaderInfo.parameters, I really need a reference to the
stage!
It may be kind of hard to follow what I'm asking because in a
way I'm trying to subvert the 'Flex' way of doing things and have
as little MXML as possible, but if anyone has any pointers on how I
can do this, I'd love to hear them. Please keep in mind I'm using
the Flex 2 SDK, not Flex Builder, so I'd prefer to hear how I can
make this work just with MXML and ActionScript, not via the Flex
Builder UI.

Answer 1

I have similar problem with mxml.xsd, but I need this file to
configure IntelliJ IDEA for supporting of mxml.
"Flex provides an XML schema to enable IDEs that support XML
with code coloring, code hinting, etc., including IntelliJ IDEA,
Borland JBuilder, and Altova xmlspy. You can also use code editors
such as VI and emacs with Flex."
But I did not found any xsd file :-(
http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/flex/productinfo/tooling/