Flex viewstack question

Question

My default creationpolicy for my viewstack causes each child
component to be created only when a user navigates to it. This is
good for performance. I was wondering if there was a way to have it
recreate itself each time a user comes back to that particular
view. Also is there a way to explicitly call a recreate on a
particular child in a viewstack?
Thanks

Answer 1

Let's say the child component in question displays the
information about a house for sale: the price, square footage,
number of bedrooms, etc. In this component you would have Label
components and either Text or TextInput fields to hold the values:
Price: $175,000
In Flex you could code this as: <mx:Label text="Price"
/> <mx:Text text="{price}" />
Here, the price is a variable in the component which is bound
to the Text component using the Flex binding notation of { and }.
You declare price (and all of the other values) using:
[Bindable] public var price:Number;
[Bindable] public var bedrooms:Number;
// etc.
To repopulate this component with new data you just set the
variables:
<mx:ViewStack ..>
....<AgentInfo id="agentInfo" ../.>
....<RealEstateInfo id="realInfo" .../ >
</mx:ViewStack>
realInfo.price = 200000; or realInfo.price =
dataFromServer.price;
You set up some variables in the component to hold your data
and bind those variables to the UI controls. Whenever you change
the variables the values on the screen change.
The beauty of data binding is that you don't need to have the
component created - the ViewStack by default only creates the
contents of its first child. If this realInfo child is the second
or third, the controls within it won't be created until the user
visits it. But the variables are created so you can change them and
data binding will take care of the rest.
There is a simpler way to do the binding. Every component has
a "data" property. Let's say you have an ActionScript class that
represents the information about a house (House class). Rather than
doing:
realInfo.price = house.price;
realInfo.bedrooms = house.bedrooms;
etc.
You can do:
realInfo.data = house;
and then instead of <mx:Text text="{price}" /> in the
component, do <mx:Text text="{data.price}" />