HBox Styling - Dynamic Positioning

Question

Hey folks.
Situation: I am creating a game for a fellow employer. I have HBoxes inside VBoxes, and this is all done through pure as3 code, no CData scripts in the MXML file or whatever. I'm going to be adding flash assets (of type Sprite) onto the HBoxes, I've already created a wrapper class that extends UIComponent and takes in a Sprite in the conctructor. I drew a complex rectangle shape in the HBox. I want to have dynamic positioning of the flash assets I load into the HBox, nothing like asset1.x = 50; asset2.x = 150. When its loaded, I want it to automatically float left and what not. Remember, this is all done through pure as3, everything from instantation to styling, no external stuff either.
Goal: Children of my HBox need to have around 40 pixels of space between them organized in a horizontal manner (hence HBox).
Attempted: I've tried myBox.setStyle("horizontalGap", 40) and although there is an increase in the horizontalGap property (I traced it out before and after, original value was 8 and is now 40), there is no visual difference, as in when I add multiple flash assets onto the HBox, they are not dispersed horizontally by 40 pixels...they're all on top of each other.

Answer 1

Hey,
            hbox1.addChild(new SpriteUIComponent(a));
            hbox1.addChild(new SpriteUIComponent(b));
            hbox1.setStyle("horizontalGap", 40);
Thats the code that I'm running, a and b are just some sprite objects I created thats created like var a:Sprite = Sprite(new randomShape()); where randomShape is a black octagon of some sort. So yeah, I am adding it to the HBox, not the canvas.