TextFlow and Controller Being Created Too Early?

Question

I've successfully rolled my work with the TextFlow into a
Canvas component, made it into an SWC, and made that part of the
application it was originally designed for. No problems. Alright,
now time to re-use my work in another app. that could benefit from
a rich text component. Went through the usual motions and got all
of my UI for my text component to render except the TextFlow!
Then what I discovered is when I resized the browser window
that hosting my Flex app, the cascade of resize events got the
TextFlow to finish rendering, the scroll bars got adjusted
properly, and it was ready to accept input with the blinking
cursor.
Here is a dump from some trace statements I have in my code,
I'm trying to work out the order in which events are happening and
when the text flow gets proper measurements:
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
0 H: 0
Composer -> Creating Display Controller -> TextFlow
Dimensions -> W: 754 H: 0
Composer -> Created
MessageEditorBase -> Created
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Show
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
754 H: 0
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
1328 H: 274
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
1328 H: 275
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
1329 H: 276
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
1334 H: 277
MessageEditorBase -> Event Fired -> Resize
Composer -> Resize -> New TextFlow Dimensions -> W:
1350 H: 279
"MessageEditorBase" is a canvas (used as a tab) that gets
displayed to the user. Within that Canvas are lots of components
including the "Composer" which is basically a toolbar of elegant
buttons and format functions, and then a blank canvas which holds a
UIComponent and becomes the DisplayObjectController. Works great in
my other app, the code is nearly line for line with Adobe's
examples.
Notice how it starts 0,0; then gets a width measurement of
754; finally when I the user resize the entire application do the
rest of the proper dimensions get computed.
I don't think it's a TextFlow problem, but I can't say I
understand the Flex rendering hierarchy enough to have implemented
TextFlow and its controller in the right way with this app.
Any thoughts? If you need more information just ask and I'll
try to explain as best as possible.

Answer 1

As it turns out with a lot of fiddling and trace statements,
I figured out a way to initialize the DisplayObjectController with
valid pixel values. In your TLF examples, the developers always
created a display object controller using specific dimensions, like
250 x 250. But I need my text component to be created dynamically
based on the screen size of the user. This was not happening
correctly after I upgraded to TLF build 370, though it's not even a
TLF problem.
I took the measurements from the parent canvas. For whatever
strange reason, in the world of measuring Flex components, the
child canvas further down in the application, the one that I added
the sprite to, was not getting measured out correctly. Thus when I
passed the controller width and height values from this child, they
were 0.
I hope that made sense, but either way, problem fixed.
Edit:
Here's an example of my code using a custom controller that
had the keyDown event overriden:
theController = new
ComposerDisplayController(uiFlowComponent, uiTextArea.width,
uiTextArea.height, this);
I passed values which I expected the UI to measure out rather
than me providing explicit pixel values. I had a problem when the
UI gave me zero.