Reference Flex Stage From AS Class

Question

I have an AS2 Class that I am converting to AS3. There are
several functions which used to reference _root to get a list of
objects from the main "stage". I am having trouble finding a
reference from the class to the main application.
Specifically, this is what I would like to do:
In the AS3 class, I want to reference the main application's
stage display list and parse through it. For example, if I were
using the following code from
http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flex/2/docs/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm?context=L iveDocs_Parts&file=00001853.html
in an AS3 class, and I wanted to parse through the DisplayList of
the main application's stage objects, how could I reference the
main application stage without having to pass the objects through
from the main application?
The following code works if it is part of the main
application, but using 'this' in the function call doesn't work,
nor does the use of 'stage' if this same code is moved to and AS
class and imported into the main application.
function traceDisplayList(container:DisplayObjectContainer,
indentString:String = ""):void {
var child:DisplayObject;
for (var i:uint=0; i < container.numChildren; i++) {
child = container.getChildAt(i);
trace (indentString, child, child.name);
if (container.getChildAt(i) is DisplayObjectContainer) {
traceDisplayList(DisplayObjectContainer(child), indentString
+ " ")
traceDisplayList(this);
Any suggestoins? Am I just approaching this the wrong way?
Thank you.

Answer 1

Thank you Peter. This was exactly what I needed. To make it
work properly I just had to:
import mx.core.Application
var tempObj:Object = Application.application;
traceDisplayList(tempObj);
It works great! Thank you.