Updating sceen elements in a for loop?

Question

Hi
I have a for loop that, among other things, contains an appendText command.  It adds a character to a text box on the screen.
I notice that rather than append the text on each iteration, it waits until the for loop has finished, and then appends all the characters.
It's not noticable on short loops, but very noticable on longer ones.
Is there a way to make flash update the text box as each iteration happens, rather than dump all the appended text at the end?
Thanks guys.
Shaun

Answer 1

Hi Kenneth
I've been playing around with that this afternoon, and am making progress, but was wondering if you could please explain it a little with regard to my code?
The function I want to have a graphical progress on is  populateOutputBox().  Basically, it's taking data from an array (songlist), adding text to each array item, appending the result to a text box, and then the save function saves the data from the text box as a txt file.
It was working fine as a for loop, but as you've shown, no screen updates could happen if a lot of data is being processed.
So I've changed  populateOutputBox to do one iteration, and on each check if the array has been iterated through.
Here's that code, followed by the code I've taken from your tut for checking on each frame:
function  populateOutputBox() {
   //blah blah code for adding text to array items, then...
    p = p + 1;
    if (p == songlist.length)
            saveFunction();   
    else
            populateOutputBox();
function startFunc() : void {
    addEventListener( Event.ENTER_FRAME, onCycle );
    //populateOutputBox();
function onCycle( event : Event ) : void {
   var cycle : Boolean = true;
   var startVar : Number = getTimer();
   var milliseconds = 1000 / stage.frameRate - 1;
   while( cycle && (getTimer() - startVar) < milliseconds ) {
       cycle = populateOutputBox();
   if( cycle == false ) {
       removeEventListener( Event.ENTER_FRAME, populateOutputBox );
As it stands, Flash seems to do nothing when I run it.  Am I supposed to initiate populateOutputBox(); in the startFunc(), or does that happen automatically in the onCycle func?
Thanks again Kenneth.