flash actionscript:
[quoted text, click to view]

Why don't you explicitly instantiate the children with a reference to the
parent form. That way you could store the reference in the constructor. As
long at the functions are public I think it should work.

Amy

I am developing a form-based application. There is one root form called
"Application" and a few child forms off the root (e.g., Login, CustView). I
would like the sibling forms to be able to pass contol to each other (e.g.,
after successful login, I want to make Login invisible and CustView visible).

I wanted the root form to control this interaction, but I'm not sure how
events in child can be handled in the parent. This is a common technique, but
in this case, the parent doesn't explicitly instantiate the child, so I can't
just pass a reference to the parent to the child's constructor. I can use
this.parentForm to get a reference to the parent form, but I can't seem to find
the parent's methods, just it's gui elements (i.e.,
this.parentForm.parentMethod() doesn't work).

Can some tell me how to do this? I am considering a FormManager class, which
is a singleton class that each form can registers with and can use to toggle
the visibility of itself and its siblings, but I wanted to see if there was an
easier way to access methods on the class instance associated a parent's form.

Any suggestions?

Andy

Thanks for the reply. My problem may have been a typo, but exploring your
suggestion raised a question in my mind.

The child form get instantiated in my code by the parent. It also gets
automatically instantiated when the application loads. I guess this is
because the form is crewated in the swf file and not dynamically, in the code.
I am curious about the life cycle of an aplication and its forms. Can I create
a form in the Flash authoring environment and not instantiate it automatically
(I know there's an autoload property, but I don't think that's the answer. I
haven't seen any detailed documentation on this. Any suggestions?

The following code produces the subsequent output.

class org.clever.caregiverconnect.Application extends mx.screens.Form {
public var caregiverLogin_frm:CaregiverLogin;
function Application() {
trace("constructing Application: " + this);
this.caregiverLogin_frm = new CaregiverLogin(this);
}
}


class org.clever.caregiverconnect.CaregiverLogin extends mx.screens.Form {
private var parentFormInstance:Application;
public function CaregiverLogin (parentFormInstance:Application) {
super();
this.parentFormInstance = parentFormInstance;
trace("constructing CaregiverLogin parentFormInstance: " +
this.parentFormInstance);
trace(" parentForm
: " + this.parentForm);
trace(" ");
}
}

Output Trace
constructing Application: _level0.application_frm
constructing CaregiverLogin parentFormInstance: _level0.application_frm
parentForm
: null

constructing CaregiverLogin parentFormInstance: undefined
parentForm
: _level0.application_frm