How Do You Populate A Spark List Control With An Array?

Question

Hello, all,
Sorry to come accross so frustrated, but how in the name of God do you populate a Spark list control with the data in an array?  You used to be able to do this with the mx:List control, but the guys developing Flex just had to make things more difficult than they need to be!  I am more of a code purist and prefer doing things the way they have been done for decades, but apparently nothing can ever stay simple!
I simply want to populate a list control with an array and this shouldn't be rocket science!  I found out that I must use a "collection" element, so I decided that an arrayCollection would be best.  However, after searching Adobe's documentation about arrayCollections, I am lost in a black hole of data binding, extra lines of code just to add a new element, the need to sort it, etc...!
Here is my code:
var pendingArray:ArrayCollection = new ArrayCollection();
for ( var i:int = 0 ; i < queue.length ; i++ )
     var item:UserQueueItem = queue[i] as UserQueueItem ;
     if ( item.status == UserQueueItem.STATUS_PENDING )
     pendingArray.addItem({label:item.descriptor.displayName,descriptor:item.descriptor});
Here is the relevant MXML:
<s:VGroup>
     <s:List id="knockingList" width="110" height="100"/>              
</s:VGroup>
I'm not getting any errors, but the list is not populating.
I have seen several examples where the arrayCollection is declared and populated in MXML:
        <mx:ArrayCollection id="myAC">
            <!-- Use an fx:Array tag to associate an id with the array. -->
            <fx:Array id="myArray">
                <fx:Object label="MI" data="Lansing"/>
                <fx:Object label="MO" data="Jefferson City"/>
                <fx:Object label="MA" data="Boston"/>
                etc...
           </fx:Array>
        </mx:ArrayCollection>
That may be fine for an example, but I think this is a rare situation.  Most of the time I would image that the arrayCollection would be created and populated on the fly in ActionScript!  How can I do this?
Thanks in advance for any help or advice anyone can give!
Matt

Answer 1

In your post it seemed like you were trying to take care of many considerations at once: optimization, design, architecture.  I would suggest you get something up and running and then worry about everything else.
If I use data binding, then I will probably have to declare the  arrayCollection as a global variable and then I'll have to write 100 or  so extra lines of code to addItem(), removeItem(), sort(), etc...  It  just seems like too much overhead.
I believe you may have some misconceptions about databinding in general.  You won't have to make it a global variable and you certainly won't need an extra 100 lines of code.  If you did this forum would be a very , very quiet place.
I don't want to use data binding because the original array is refreshed  often and there is one function called by an event that re-declares the  arrayCollection each time, populates it with the array, and then sets  it as the list's dataprovider.
That is the beauty of the ArrayCollection, it can handle the updates to its source Array. I don't know if you need to redeclare the ArrayCollection, resetting the source to the new Array allows everyone involved to keep their references so you don't have to worry about any "spooky" stuff going on.