NativeMenuItem.data disappearing

Question

I am trying to add native menu items to my Flex-based AIR app. I'm working on the Mac implementation first. I'm getting the existing menu bar with NativeApplication.nativeApplication.menu, adding a SELECT event listener on it, finding the existing File menu and adding an item to it. The item uses a string in the data field as a command code, so my event handler looks like this:
        private function onNativeMenuSelect(evt:Event):void
        var itemData:String = evt.target.data;
switch(itemData)
case "open":
onOpenCmd();
break;
case "saveAs":
onSaveAsCmd();
break;
default:
mCurrentWorkspace.DoCommand(itemData);
Unfortunately, this only works once. It appears that after that, the data property on the menu items I added has been set to null. I could add a separate even listener to each menu item, but shouldn't this approach work? Or is soemthing in AIR reserving the data field for something else?
David

Answer 1

I just tried adding an instance variable to my application to save a reference to the File menu NativeMenu object. Now its menu items seem to work reliably. (But I've been fooled before.) My guess is that AIR lets the NativeMenu object representations of the menus it thinks it owns be garbage collected, causing the data property for menu items (and maybe attached event listeners on NativeMenuItems) to be lost. And maybe keeping my own reference to the NativeMenu prevents that garbage collection.
Any thoughts on that? Does that sound like a bug?
David