How to add RichEditableText of TextArea using only ActionScript

My head is spinning from two days of trying to find an answer to this seemingly simple question.

I'm developing a Flex/AIR application built entirely in ActionScript -- there's no MXML beyond what was originally auto-created.

I need to dynamically generate some kind of editable text-field with high control over formatting. The TLF text fields all seem great, except that I can't get any of them to render on the screen. Due to the nature of the application, they have to be inside a MovieClip, but since I've read that everything must be a descendant of UIComponent, I use UIMovieClip, which is AddChild'ed to the stage.

I'm about to go crazy here, the whole application is in jeopardy over this. I CAN NOT use MXML, and all the 10,000 examples on the internet are MXML. I need to generate these dynamically. I need to generate upwards of 50 fields under one movieclip based on database data. There's no way to hardcode that with MXML. Please don't suggest to change this. The GUI is very specific about this, and it's the right GUI.

In two days of searching, I can't find a single example in ActionScript, only MXML. I've tried everything that smelled like an example.

Is there some obvious general pointer I'm missing? I'll be happy to post code, but it doesn't make sense because I've been through so many examples.

Does anyone have the simplest possible code for creating any kind of TLF text editing field in ActionScript only (zero MXML), which is then added to a MovieClip or UIMovieClip开发者_如何学JAVA, which is added to the stage of a desktop AIR application?

I will greatly cherish any help here.

Best,

Per

This should get you started:

//create your TextFlow component
var textFlow:TextFlow = new TextFlow();
var p:ParagraphElement = new ParagraphElement();
var span:SpanElement = new SpanElement();
span.text = "hello world";
p.addChild(span);
textFlow.addChild(p);

//create a Sprite that will contain the text
var textBlock:Sprite = new Sprite();
//create a controller for compositing
var controller:ContainerController = new ContainerController(textBlock);
//set the size of the composition
controller.setCompositionSize(100, 200);
//make the controller control the TextFlow object
textFlow.flowComposer.addController(controller);
//update the composition
textFlow.flowComposer.updateAllControllers();

//add to the stage
addChild(textBlock);

About the size: it is important you use setCompositionSize() instead of the Sprite's width and height properties.

Using addController() you could spread the text over several Sprites. Each Sprite would have its own ContainerController, but all would share the same FlowComposer which would calculate the composition.

warning : using TLF like this can be pretty complicated. Above code is the bare minimum to get things running. I do not know your requirements, but you'll probably hit a few other roadblocks along the way. You have to ask yourself this question: are you really willing to drop all the built-in features of TextArea? It might cost you months of development to get things right, depending on the requirements. You still may want to reconsider your architecture...